Plex lays off 20% of its workforce
Plex, the free streaming app, laid off approximately 20% of its staff, TechCrunch has learned, which will affect all departments, including the Personal Media teams.
“This is by far the hardest decision we’ve had to make at Plex,” CEO Keith Valory said in a statement. “These are all wonderful people, great colleagues, and good friends. But we believe it is the right thing for the long-term health and stability of Plex.”
The streaming app gives users a single destination to upload and organize content (video, audio and photos) from their own server while also allowing them to stream it via mobile app, smart TV or desktop.
In recent years, however, Plex has invested in free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) and live TV offerings. The FAST market has become saturated as many companies have entered the space. Plus, the overall advertising industry has taken a hit, making it harder for companies to earn enough revenue.
Valory noted in his statement that the company was significantly impacted by the slowdown. “While we adjusted our business plan last year after the shift in equity markets to get us back on a path to profitability without having to cut personnel expenses, the downturn in the ad market in Q2 put significantly more pressure on our business and ultimately it became clear that we would need to take additional measures in order to maintain a confident path to profitability within the next 18 months,” he said.
He added that the company is still expected to see 30% growth this year.
According to a Slack message from Valory, obtained by The Verge, which first reported the layoffs, Valory noted that 37 employees would be impacted.
Additionally, it seems that Plex may have had another round of layoffs earlier this year. Five months ago, a former account executive posted on LinkedIn that they were “affected by company layoffs.”
As of January, the company had 175 employees, and its revenue was in the double-digit millions.
Updated 6/29/23 at 12:10 p.m. ET with a statement from CEO.
I used Plex for years, and it is the superior product (if you pay) compared to Open Source alternatives. However, after seeing Plex's recent incentive pivots and looking for investors I jumped shipped to Jellyfin. The thermometor of enshittification is indicating that Plex is on its way out.
Folks who haven't looked at alternatives yet, do so now.
Jellyfin, caddy and duckdns can get you all the benefits Plex offers without needing to use their servers for logging in
Literally the only two things keeping me from jumping ship are the multi-user support and Plexamp.
Jellyfin has support for mutliple users
Jellyfin has both of those things, only slightly worse.
I don't think the multi user is worse, I prefer the way Jellyfin does it. Finamp is definitely a downgrade though.
If you are on Android there is Finamp for Jellyfin. It's not quite as nice but it is clean and free. There is also Symfonium which is I think $3 but it is even nicer than Plexamp IMO. The great thing about Jellyfin is there are many options.
And Jellyfin has third party music player apps for android and IOS.
Well shit… it seems the recent rash of enshittification continues. I didn’t realize Plex was doing this so I guess an exit strategy is required. Thanks for the heads up.
I'm a lifetime Plex pass subscriber and I've also used Kodi and Embh.. as far as I can remember at the moment I've never really looked into Jellyfin tho... Does it support OTA DVR with a tuner card like Plex?
That's my must have at this point.
Jellyfin is an Emby fork, so it should support everything Emby does and more; I've never fucked around with OTA with it, but as far as I know it can do it
It is? TIL, that's pretty interesting.
Emby was originally open-source, but went closed-source; Jellyfin forked from the last open-source version
Good to know...
But according to this article from March it looks like it doesn't support PCI or USB tuners unfortunately.
Also sounds like it's quite a ways behind Plex still in terms of UI, bugginess, and ease of use when away from home.
I'll be sticking with Plex for now.
The last time I was having problems with Plex and authentication I installed emby alongside it
Emby was a hell of a lot more responsive, Plex seemed to be more compatible with, well everything.
I use live TV and DVR so I think I might miss that on jellyfin
Jellyfin does support live tv and recording