We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
Very, apparently.
They use UPnP and NAT-PMP1 to have clients directly stream the media from users’ own self-hosted servers. It costs them almost nothing in bandwidth to do that.
To be fair, they didn’t say that they needed more resources for remote streaming
Fair enough, although that actually has worse optics IMO. It goes from “this costs us money, so pay us” to “we need money, so we’re creating an artificial reason for you to pay us”
Oh yeah, I am in no way arguing in favour of it