A recent announcement dropped from Plex. It seemed to fly under the radar for a few days until I came across it on Tik Tok (of all places). The most important of these changes will be in effect on April 29th, 2025.

The biggest part of this announcement is that people watching videos on your Plex server that are not on your local network, they are going to need to pay somehow. This is where Plex creates a new subscription called “Remote playback with a Remote Watch Pass subscription,” and all those remote users will have to pay that to see your server. So, your in-laws watching those home videos from another town, someone has to pay now where it used to be free.

If you want to figure out who has access to you’re remote library or if you’ve let someone in, get that on the “Manage Server Access” page:

http://SERVER/web/index.html#!/settings/manage-library-access

What’s crazy is that all of the work of sharing a library is done by the user. The one with a Plex server has to supply the space, the bandwidth, and just about everything but brokering the connection. But, for the convenience of making all of this so seamless in the software, its going to cost. Plex has been under fire lately for appearing to support movie piracy, and this may be their ultimate solution to combat this problem. After all, if no one will pay for the movies, they’ll never pay for Plex either, right?

For those on a mobile platform and have paid that one-time mobile activation fee to play past one minute, you can get what Plex calls an extended trial. This appears to be a messy process that will likely confuse people who don’t understand what’s coming. Given that this it a trial, it will end and cut all those users off.

Given all this, it seems the squeeze is on to push people into the lifetime $119.99 USD Plex Pass, at least until they go after users again in some other way. After April 29th, this lifetime cost goes up to $249.99 USD. I could not find a real definition for “lifetime” from them, but let’s take it on the surface for what it is. I’m seeing comments on Reddit that they bought this subscription 15 years ago for $75.00 USD and they’re still using it. So, perhaps the “lifetime” is what it seems.

I tend to lean towards the support of these guys. They make a great tool and deserve the support of the community to make it better. Let’s hope they don’t pull a switch on their customers and mess with the lifetime subscription.