Ok, so you’re implying people were using their videos for free instead of paying for the streaming services. Then Plex wanted more money so they’ve started to charge people for using their own stuff.

That’s fine, and frankly I agree with that.

But your initial reply to me is still irrelevant to the discussion.

It’s irrelevant because even Plex themselves made no mention of their in-house streaming stuff. The discussion is about being charged to view your videos, hosted on your own self-hosted server, viewed on your own device.

But the blog post from Plex was specifically talking about charging for remotely accessing your own files. So your point is irrelevant to the discussion.

Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.

Are you under the impression that Plex uploads the movie files to their servers and then transcodes them there, or something?

And the hard work happens on your own hardware. All Plex’s servers are doing is acting as a signaling server, but no media or routed through Plex’s servers.