It certainly doesn’t cost what they’re charging.
That's how services and products work. If they sold their product at cost, they'd go bankrupt. They're actually charging peanuts for the service they provide.
Remote play you can't unless you want to open your network up to the internet, which is a terrible idea, and even then most TVs and devices don't have a JellyFin app.
but those $300 60" TVs cost manufacturers more than that in parts and shipping.
They don't.
Look at an major TV manufactures books and the TV part is a loss, the income they get from the TV is selling you to advertisers.
I'd love to see your source for this. I won't hold my breathe because it's simply not true.
Tailscale isn't on 99.99% of TVs and devices that people want to stream videos to, and asking people to connect to your VPN whenever they want to stream video is a no-go. Anyone suggesting it is has never actually done tech support for regular people.
made my interface hard to navigate
How? What is hard to navigate in Plex?
try constantly to shove their own content down my (and my users) throats.
I assume you don't know you can customize your home screen and menus? You can only have your own content showing if you want.
You can’t say their service hasn’t gotten worse though :)
I absolutely can. It has only improved since I've been using it, which is from the very start.
I bought a lifetime license on day 1 iirc. I wanted to support the software that was so good and better than everything else at the time. I have had zero features yanked.
I want to stream remotely, share my library, and watch on any device I come across, so I'll use Plex.
You clearly don’t understand why Plex requires an account then. Hint: it’s for the features that make it the most popular and best self hosted media server software on the market.
They do not sell TVs at a loss lol.
Not if you’ve got a lifetime license, which anyone running a Plex server should already have.
Also if you want to give access to your jellyfin server to people, well you’re shit out of luck basically. You’re out of luck if you want to even watch jellyfin on most devices that aren’t a pc or android device.
Unless you want to stream remotely of course.
JellyFin does not do the same thing. JellyFin doesn't securely allow users anywhere in the world on any network to stream your media.