Plex Cloud Service To Close In November Due To Unsurmountable Technical Issues
This is proving to be a tough week for developers who are dealing with technical difficulties. Earlier today, we reported on Epic Games disabling the ability to capture and share Fortnite video clips on the Nintendo Switch due to "performance and stability" reasons. In 'hold my beer' fashion, Plex has one upped Epic Games by announcing it is shutting down its Plex Cloud service at the end of November.
Plex Cloud launched in 2016 and brought with it support for various online services, including Amazon Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive. Users could link multiple cloud storage providers to a single account (one of each) and point their libraries to content on any of them, making it a handy way to wrangle videos hosted at different places.
It was a nice service, though "challenges with performance, quality, and overall user experience" prompted Plex to disable the creation of new Plex Cloud accounts back in February of this year. As it turns out, cost was a factor as well.
"We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down the Plex Cloud service on November 30th, 2018. As you may know, we haven’t allowed any new Plex Cloud servers since February of this year, and since then we’ve been actively working on ways to address various issues while keeping costs under control. We hold ourselves to a high standard, and unfortunately, after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven’t found a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost," Plex said.
Plex said it is "super bummed" about the decision, but ultimately found it necessary in order to focus on improving its core functionality and adding new features. So, effective at the end of November, Plex users will no longer be able to access their Plex Cloud server.
Of course, the content that is hosted on the aforementioned cloud services will remain. Plex recommends that users consider downloading their content from their cloud storage provider and storing it locally on a NAS box, if that's an option.
"We encourage you to set up a Plex Media Server on a computer or NAS device on your local network and Plex On! Our friends at WD have lots of storage options from hard drives to NAS devices, and they’re currently offering a discount through Plex Pass Perks to help you out," Plex added.
RIP, Plex Cloud.
