Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in Account Settings or using this page.
Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/ (Might have to clear cache)
Can also read about the changes here: https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
That is a honey pot rights holders will be falling over themselves to pay Plex for access to once they hear about it.
Been telling anyone that would listen that they need to get out of Plex since they implemented that first iteration of trying to require you to sign into your own self hosted server with a Plex.tv account. They were telegraphing what direction they were going in with that kind of user hostile move.
Lots of responses about how it was easy to get around so no big deal (or worse that they liked it for some coping mechanism reason) and that nothing else was as easy and feature rich as Plex so it was worth it.
Well now a few years down the road from that they are now going to use that beach head on everyone's Plex server they can to collect what is being watched and sell it to the highest bidder.
I joined Plex after I already needed to have a login to plex.tv to be able to stream. I understand that that already was problematic, but Plex was leagues ahead of its competition in terms of ease of adding users, as well as polish. You must be forgetting how awful Jellyfin was in comparison, even just 5 years ago. I've been keeping up on Jellyfin and it's amazing how far they've come. Now Jellyfin has great theme options, a simple-to-install skip intro/outro plugin, an app option with built-in jellyseerr integration, decent collections support (still needs some work here on feature parity with Plex, but it's on the way) and with Wizarr, onboarding new users is as easy as sending an invite link, just like Plex. All this came in the last 5 years, and were pretty much requirements for my use cases.
Sure you can say that I'm picky, but Plex really was the best option until like, this year. I started to accept the need to switch when they added the social media aspect to it. They completely ignored what their users actually wanted. Since then, they've been making worse and worse decisions, which is crazy because now more than ever their competition has reached their level. Hell, by pushing all their users away, Plex is only going to accelerate the development on Jellyfin.