{"id":312955,"date":"2025-11-27T21:28:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T21:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/312955\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T21:28:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T21:28:09","slug":"plex-starts-paywalling-remote-streaming-to-tvs-beginning-with-its-roku-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/312955\/","title":{"rendered":"Plex starts paywalling remote streaming to TVs, beginning with its Roku app"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s some bad news for folks who’ve been using Plex to stream stuff from a buddy’s personal media server to their TV for free for years. As it pledged to do earlier this year when it bumped up the price of the Plex Pass<\/a>, the service is starting to enforce<\/a> a paywall for remote streaming from a personal server to TV apps. Plex is rolling out the change on its Roku app this week<\/a>, followed by its other TV apps (on the likes of Fire TV, Apple TV and Android TV) and third-party clients that use its remote streaming API in 2026. Plex also recently started deploying a redesigned version<\/a> of its app on Roku-powered TVs.<\/p>\n

Under the new way of things<\/a>, the owner of a media server needs a Plex Pass subscription to grant other people remote access to it through the service. A Plex Pass now costs $7 per month, $70 per year or $250 for a lifetime membership. Those with such a subscription (or the Remote Watch Pass for $2 per month or $20 per year) can remotely access someone else’s media server, even if the server owner doesn’t have Plex Pass. Plex started enforcing the change on mobile devices before doing so elsewhere.<\/p>\n

It always stinks when a company puts up a paywall around a feature that was previously free. Plex needs to make money to keep things running, which is fair enough. But turning free features into paid ones is hardly a consumer-friendly approach, especially when there are open-source alternatives like Jellyfin around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here’s some bad news for folks who’ve been using Plex to stream stuff from a buddy’s personal media…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[23083,64,63,177208,177209,177207,177206,105],"class_list":["post-312955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-apple-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-media-server","tag-personal-server","tag-plex-pass","tag-plex-pass-subscription","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}