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.
The biggest thing was syncing watch states across multiple servers. We have access to a number of Plex servers and it’s super simple to have the state of each episode synced & saved so you don’t need to think about it.
I tried a few plugins for Jellyfin but could never quite get there.
Outside of that we’ve had some other smaller issues. Not to be rude but the Android TV app is… bad. We have a lot of issues trying to fast forward / rewind in the app. Many times fast forwarding completely freezes playback, but if I fast forward to a point, hit back to go back to the episode page, then hit “resume from <time stamp I fast forwarded to>” it works great. So jumping from minute 1 to minute 10 doesn’t work, but going from min 1 to min 10, closing the episode, then hitting “Resume from minute 10” works great.
It’s a lot of small frustrating things like that. However, Jellyfin definitely has its upsides. It plays high bitrate / high res files more smoothly than Plex for sure, both from a local and remote network. I’m not against it, it just feels more like “something for a tech guy” and less like “something for the whole family” right now to me. I look forward to the day I can switch without concern though.
It’s interesting you say that because jellyfin tracks my familys watch times better than netflix. I will agree the apps are bad. I normally use a browser view on my xbox instead of the app lol. The only issue ive experienced is on one of my old smart tvs fast forwarding and pausing doesn’t work, but i chalk that up to it being a 9 year old smart tv.