Plex, the free streaming app, laid off approximately 20% of its staff, TechCrunch has learned, which will affect all departments, including the Personal Media teams.
“This is by far the hardest decision we’ve had to make at Plex,” CEO Keith Valory said in a statement. “These are all wonderful people, great colleagues, and good friends. But we believe it is the right thing for the long-term health and stability of Plex.”
The streaming app gives users a single destination to upload and organize content (video, audio and photos) from their own server while also allowing them to stream it via mobile app, smart TV or desktop.
In recent years, however, Plex has invested in free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) and live TV offerings. The FAST market has become saturated as many companies have entered the space. Plus, the overall advertising industry has taken a hit, making it harder for companies to earn enough revenue.
Valory noted in his statement that the company was significantly impacted by the slowdown. “While we adjusted our business plan last year after the shift in equity markets to get us back on a path to profitability without having to cut personnel expenses, the downturn in the ad market in Q2 put significantly more pressure on our business and ultimately it became clear that we would need to take additional measures in order to maintain a confident path to profitability within the next 18 months,” he said.
He added that the company is still expected to see 30% growth this year.
According to a Slack message from Valory, obtained by The Verge, which first reported the layoffs, Valory noted that 37 employees would be impacted.
Additionally, it seems that Plex may have had another round of layoffs earlier this year. Five months ago, a former account executive posted on LinkedIn that they were “affected by company layoffs.”
As of January, the company had 175 employees, and its revenue was in the double-digit millions.
Updated 6/29/23 at 12:10 p.m. ET with a statement from CEO.
I really hope Jellyfin gets a leg up soon, as a Plex Lifetime Pass owner I have become more and more discontent with the platform.
When I paid for my personal licence, it included downloads for all my users, now its cutoff to only older users. I had expected that Plexamp would only be restricted to me while it was being developed, but it remains locked away from my users should never individually have a reason to subscribe for just themselves.
I bought my licence to support the company for the use of my server and I feel like they've only downgraded my service in the last couple years. Getting new users to jump through all of the hoops with their pinned content, only to have them ask me why there are adverts on my movies is frustrating.
I feel like very little has improved in the core product in years, my users default settings are still transcoding to the same bitrate, or 10x its bitrate. Every time I have made a valid suggestion on the old subreddit, the Plex devs had plenty of time to reject any and all criticism.
I don't believe Plex is going to get much better and likely we will see further erosion of our licences as the company only focuses on free users and the FAST service. I will keep checking in on jellyfin and alternatives, hopefully they get a boost soon.
You might give it a try, its a pretty well featured streaming platform. Has a ton of customization for some areas too.
I installed it, but, yet, still use plex instead. Jellyfin does have a native app for my streaming devices too. Plex- just has an interface I prefer at this time.
I'm currently setting up jellyfin as a test run for just my music library to see how the metadata & customisation is managed, currently I'm struggling to merge an artist that has been split and the only suggestions I find is to edit the filenames.
Oooh this is gonna be a big problem for me, thanks for the heads up.
It could still be the learning curve, I don't know for sure if it's not able to merge artists