They’re capitalists.

You don’t get to be the size of Metro without being a selfish, greedy, asshole. Aka, a capitalist.

It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.

Popularist and nationalist.

I wonder where I’ve seen that before…

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

I will say, from my own limited experience, instances of racist/bigoted comments have diminished over time.

I’ll be clear, it still happens. But it’s less than it was.

I’m continually hopeful that racism will be eliminated in future generations, and it is my wish that it happens soon.

I’ll also be clear: I don’t keep company with that kind of person. Anyone who can judge another based on their country of origin, the color of their skin, or their creed/motto/whatever alone, isn’t worth my time, nor effort to associate with, know, or have any kind of relationship with at all, for any reason, for any length of time. Those people are not worth my time nor mental effort to accommodate. They’re not even worth the oxygen they consume.

I’m in a riding that is consistently held by the conservatives, and not by a small amount. There are something like 40-50k votes cast in my riding and the difference between lib and conservative was about 6k.

I still go out and vote, because some day the 6k difference might be 12 individual votes…

If the conservatives win by a handful of votes, and I didn’t vote, I don’t think I could forgive myself.

I’m in Southern Ontario and I’m definitely not a minority.

I see the racist rhetoric regularly. People see me, a straight white male, and more than a few times, mistake me for a like-minded individual, and they let their racism spew out like bile.

Makes me sick.

It also makes me sick to think that Canadians could be so cruel to the indigenous peoples. I don’t think any amount of time, reparations, or anything else, could make up for what occurred.

We’re Canadians, if you’re not indigenous, then you’re either an immigrant, or the descendant of an immigrant. We’re all here, equal in the eyes of the law (not law enforcement/police, the letter of the law), and there’s no good excuse to act otherwise. United we stand, divided we fall. One country in particular, wants us to be divided. Don’t let them win.

Vive le Canada!

I did my part. Now hopefully the rest of you all don’t fuck it up.

Successful in mass media, sure.

Idk. I haven’t met enough people from any of these states to have an opinion.

I’m Canadian, I don’t hate the idea.

In any case, it’s clear that the USA is less “United” these days… It’s more just … The States of America now.

To be clear, the people who want this are the American capitalists who stand to profit off of Canada’s natural resources. If we were a US state it would be much easier, almost downright trivial, to move up here and take whatever they want.

Obviously, Canada, and Canadians, don’t want that, and it would seem most of the US population doesn’t either.

IMO, this seems like a move by the people who are puppeteering Trump around. They see an opportunity to exploit what is currently a sovereign nation, and they’re going for using Trump as little more than a mouthpiece for their goals.

Sorry about that. I’m not far from the border at Niagara falls and I know how much power is sent over the lines across the Niagara River (generally)… It’s not great, and I’m sorry you have been caught in the crossfire here.

You don’t want this, I can assure you, we don’t want this, but it’s what is happening.

I mean … Comparing anything to US News outlets is kind of setting the bar really low, isn’t it?

That’s fair. There’s still sensible people in the USA.

I was a little unclear before, the set of people who think this makes sense is entirely within the set of people in the USA. Which doesn’t and shouldn’t imply that all people in the USA believe that this makes sense.

I apologize if there was any implication of lumping all Americans into the same pool of stupidity. That’s an insult to you and I am sorry.

Have a good day neighbor.

The only people it makes sense to, for Canada becoming a US state, is the people in the USA.

We have land and resources they need, that we are happy to sell them, year over year.

Also, just to mention, the dairy thing? Yeah, that’s on dairy products beyond a certain cap. It’s there to encourage the use of Canadian dairy, instead of relying on foreign dairy… You know, so our dairy farmers don’t go broke.

Looking at the records, that import limit has been hit… Carry the one… Yeah, exactly zero times.

🖕

Sincerely,

• Canada

I like that Trudeau announced he was fucking leaving and before he could get his ass out the door and let someone else take the lead, all this shit happens because Trump was elected.

What a fucking circus.