Plex has confirmed that it will require a Remote Watch Pass or Plex Pass for remote streaming on its TV apps. The change is going into effect for the Roku app first, followed by all other TV apps and third-party clients in 2026.
Earlier this year, Plex increased its pricing for Plex Pass and stopped supporting all options for free remote streaming in the Plex apps, such as adding a custom server connection in the app settings. The company said at the time, “The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature.” That’s also when Plex introduced the Remote Watch Pass as a less expensive way to enable remote streaming again.
Plex is now rolling out the remote watch changes to its Roku TV app. If you have Plex Pass, or the owner of the server you’re streaming from has Plex Pass, you don’t need to do anything. Otherwise, if you are streaming on a different network from the server’s home network, you need Plex Pass or Remote Watch Pass.
Switched to Jellyfin after more than a decade with Plex. Prettey… prettey… pretty good.
Yup. Shame the new version is unusable for me. Hopefully they fix the bugs.
Oh? I haven’t upgraded yet. 😄
I can recommend a local Wireguard server for this. I have one port on my router open for Wireguard and all of my devices can connect to it remotely.
Once connected, they can see all the devices on my local network, including my local jellyfin server. It works pretty painlessly and you don’t need to open any jellyfin ports to the world.
That’s how it works with Tailscale as well. Tailscale creates Wireguard tunnels underneath between the different devices. There’s also an open-source self-hostable Tailscale control plane.
Love me some Jellyfin. I was yesterday days old when I finally read some documentation and learned that my metadata issues were because I was using a mixed library type for kids shoes and movies, and that they strongly discourage it because of the unreliable metadata it causes. Split kids movies and shows apart and now that works flawlessly, still, I feel like I’d prefer they could be combined on a single library for a kids’ browsing
Why do you have a library of kiss’s shoes?
Do you remote stream (off your server network)? If so, how’s the experience?
I do. No issues.
Do you reverse proxy, Tailscale, etc to authenticate or circumvent the need for a secure connection? Every time I come close to planning a switch, that part paralyzes me, it feels so unintuitive.
I do use both a reverse proxy and Tailscale. All services are proxied. All services except for Jellyfin are accessed only via Tailscale. Jellyfin is publicly available. I’ve obscured it a bit by setting up long, randomly generated DNS name. The proxy would only forward traffic to Jellyfin if the request comes from that exact DNS name. Bots would have to know this name for the proxy to entertain their attempts at all. Then every user has long, randomly-generated password. I prefer to only use it behind Tailscale but some of my family needs direct access. Also Chromecast.
Oh fuck off, dipshits. You chose this route despite the community that built you.
If Plex was 100% paid there a would be zero complaints.
I don’t think that’s it.
There were complaints when Netflix started enforcing password sharing rules.
I think the main driver of complaints is “you promised the thing I’m paying for would be X, and now you’re changing the deal.”
There was never an explicit deal on providing free shit. Although they seem to be honoring paid stuff. If your account is old enough, content shared with friends can be downloaded even if they don’t have a Plex pass.
There were complaints… and then subscription numbers increased.
Overall. They went down in the affected areas.
Which is not what Plex is doing. There’s no change for paid users.
And the main answer is “Pray we do not change it any further.”
Cue all the users with lifetime passes not seeing that this is slowly becoming a problem…
Abandoning streaming services only to become a serf of another commercial subscription service seems like such a bizarre move that I really don’t understand how Plex users even exist.
Wow, could you get any more condescending? We bought a product (10+ years ago in my case) and it still works great. Why would I switch to an inferior service, just because the FREE version of the product I already bought got worse?
This has no impact on anyone that actually paid for Plex.
With this move the free version of Plex got downgraded, to now have feature parity with Jellyfin. Meaning a VPN is required if you want to access your media on the go
I’m not sure if you’re joking or not, but you can remotely stream from Jellyfin without using a VPN.
You CAN, but you really shouldn’t. Even the documentation says as much. The Jellyfin server is way to insecure to expose it to the open internet. In reality you can’t safely use Jellyfin remotely without a vpn
It does not say that in the documentation. What the documentation does have, however, are extensive instructions on how to make Jellyfin accessible on WAN: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/reverse-proxy/
What do you mean?
To me the problem would be modifying the lifetime pass or simply removing it (for new customers) in favor of a fucking subscription only.
Great, so the free Plex now was downgraded to feature parity with Jellyfin
I’m what way? You can remote stream on Jellyfin for zero dollars.
In the sense, that you need a VPN for both
You don’t need a VPN for plex?
So Plex has downgraded to [insert the word below feature parity] with Jellyfin.
