Personal media player Plex told its users today that it’s shutting down its Plex Cloud service at the end of November, as spotted by Variety. The Plex Cloud service has had multiple technical issues and has been in maintenance mode for a few months.
The company shared an email it sent customers with The Verge that said “after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven’t found a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost.” It continued, “While we are super bummed about the impact this will have on our happy Cloud users, ending support for it will allow us to focus on improving core functionality, adding new features and content.”
Unable to handle multiple cloud storage intergrations
Plex first launched its cloud-based media server in 2016 as a way for users to easily access extra storage. Initially, users had to subscribe to Amazon Drive, which cost $59.99 a year for unlimited storage at the time, and get a Plex Pass in order to use Plex Cloud. Then, Plex added support for Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage. (Coincidentally, Amazon ended its unlimited storage plan last year.)
Ultimately, Plex was unable to handle these integrations, running into a lot of technical issues that forced it to disable support for Amazon Drive and then stop making new cloud servers in February. By November 30th, users’ Plex Cloud servers will no longer be accessible, although media files won’t be affected. The news is a blow to premium subscribers who might have relied on Plex Cloud to store and view their personal media.
Update September 11th, 5:20PM ET: This article has been updated with a statement from Plex.