Selfhosted

They don’t want lifetime licenses to sell, they want monthly subscriptions from everyone.

As someone who picked up lifetime for like $45 or whatever it was (I think a 50% off sale?) what must have been 15 years ago...

I run jellyfin. Its just a better experience IMO.

For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex

Realistically the only advantage of Plex is being able to watch it over the internet without a VPN. Which means it makes it easier to get friends and family access to your server or to access it yourself from random smart tvs outside your house.

If you only watch at home or have a fire stick that you take with you to watch abroad or your friends/family members have one and can setup a VPN on it it's not needed.

For me, the killer app for Plex is Plexamp, the music client. It's superb, and AFAIK Jellyfin doesn't really have an equivalent (there are 3P options, but they're lacking).

Plexamp is just far superior for music. It doesn’t even come close sadly … since I only use it for my music collection I simply prefer Plex … but only because I got lifetime a long time ago for 60 bucks or something …

Are you accessing your media from outside of your network?

I have heard that you need to set up a VPN for Jellyfin to securely use your media library remotely. Plex handles all of that for me so that I don't need to deal with it.

Ease of use, and actual secure and usable external access.

Friends/family make an account and tell you their account name or email address, you invite them to your library and that’s it, they can watch/listen to your media on pretty much any device they have. No vpn needed.

Jellyfin is not meant to be exposed to the internet for remote viewing. It also doesn’t have a client on most devices people use to watch tv/movies.

We've seen other companies pull this move by saying "lifetime" only applies to X version.

They dont want you to buy lifetime they want you to pay month to month.

As a lifetime owner, the number of features they've deprecated is probably the worst part.

• Photo support (luckily Immich came along)
• Tidal integration (no idea if that was Plex or Tidal's decision)
• Plugins (god forbid anyone add the functionality they keep removing)

It's close between that and the last app overhaul that removed a bunch of functionality.

From a purely profit-oriented perspective, no. They're setting up a pretext to eliminate the lifetime license plan due to a lack of interest. No sane person would pay that kind of lump sum for the service (and the insane ones will bring in triple the revenue), so they'll claim that there is no market for it. After that, they're free to crank up the periodic subscription prices.

Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.

Not really. Their plan for a while now is to convert all to subscriptions and this is just their latest salvo. Next up is getting rid of it completely due to "no demand" and then kicking existing lifetime accounts to some static version that won't be supported.