The Enshittification of Plex Is Kicking Off, Starting with Free Roku Users

Plex, a famous way for dads to show off their (okay, our) movie and TV hoarding acumen just got incrementally less useful for certain users.

The Roku free-for-all is officially over, and more pain is coming soon.

Enforcement of a shift signaled long ago has started, beginning with people who use Roku devices to stream movies and TV from non-paid Plex servers. If that sounds insanely granular, it is. Plex is complicated, and that aspect of it is only getting worse as it gets less and less accommodating toward its free users. In fact, let’s just go ahead and call it what it is: the enshittification of Plex.

To zoom out, Plex is a flexible and robust media cataloguing and streaming platform. If you don’t instinctively use it, you’re probably not a data collector with external drives full of media like movies and TV. Plex has a way of dividing people into the group who “gets it,” and “the rest.” But within “the rest” are subsets of people who may not totally get it, but know someone who does, and that person lets them stream movies and TV for free using a mysterious app called Plex. It’s this last group that the crackdown probably most affects.

Plex works most fluidly for everyone if they pay, but historically it has provided many, many loopholes to keep users hooked as it has slowly tried to bring in revenue. But a steady dismantling of the freebie structure announced back in March is starting to finally roll out in earnest. And that brings us to what’s happening now: the Roku TV apps are starting to block remote streaming unless the viewer or the server owner pays for Plex Pass (which confers free access to shared, remote users), or if the viewer pays for a new feature called Remote Watch Pass, which costs $2 per month or $20 per year.

Practically speaking, this means that if both sides, the server owner and the viewer are free users, and the viewer is not on the same network as the server owner (meaning in the same house, in most cases) remote access will now just stop working when the Roku app updates. Enthusiasts who are free users, and only stream from home, will most likely experience very little change, but their free user friends will, basically, no longer be able to watch an enthusiast’s movie and TV collection.

This change in service reflects official Plex policy that was revised earlier this year. Free remote access was officially verboten, but still tolerated on devices with an older, un-updated version of app, like Roku—until now. And it still is tolerated for users of non-Roku devices like Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, and other smart TV operating systems. As the new Plex TV app rolls out to more devices next year, more and more people will wake up with their access to streaming content suddenly cut off.

As others before me have pointed out, Plex is a strange case. As a free media-organizing app with a fiercely loyal fanbase, it had an unclear path to profitability from the beginning. In other words, enshittification was probably inevitable. It’s still sad that it’s finally here.