The Roku free-for-all is officially over, and more pain is coming soon.
A change hinted at long ago has begun enforcement, starting with those who use Roku devices to stream movies and TV from non-paid Plex servers. If this sounds overly nuanced, it is. Plex is complicated, and this aspect of it is getting worse as it becomes less and less friendly towards its free users. In fact, let’s go ahead and call it what it is: the entanglement of Plex.
To zoom out, Plex is a flexible and robust media cataloging and streaming platform. If you don’t intuitively use it, you’re probably not a data collector with an external drive full of media like movies and TV. Plex has a way of dividing people into “get it” and “the rest” groups. But within the “rest” there are subgroups of people who don’t quite 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 is this last group that the action probably impacts the most.
Plex works most fluidly for everyone if they pay, but historically it has provided many loopholes to keep users tied in as it has tried to bring in revenue slowly. But the process of steadily dismantling the free framework announced in March is finally beginning in earnest. And that brings us to what’s happening now: Roku TV apps are starting to block remote streaming unless the viewer or server owner pays for Plex Pass (which gives 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 parties, the server owner and the viewer, are independent 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 no longer work when the Roku app is updated. Enthusiasts who are free users, and only stream from home, will likely experience very little change, but their free user friends will, basically, no longer be able to view an enthusiast’s movie and TV collection.
This change to the service reflects the official Plex policy that was revised earlier this year. had free remote access officially Verboten, but so far still tolerated on devices like Roku with an older, unupdated version of the app. And it is still 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 launches for more devices next year, more and more people will suddenly lose access to streaming content.
As others have pointed out before me, Plex is a strange case. As an independent media-organized app with an extremely loyal fan base, its path to profitability was unclear from the beginning. In other words, encroachment was probably inevitable. It’s still sad that it’s finally here.
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