Plex has confirmed that it will require a Remote Watch Pass or Plex Pass for remote streaming on its TV apps. The change is going into effect for the Roku app first, followed by all other TV apps and third-party clients in 2026.
Earlier this year, Plex increased its pricing for Plex Pass and stopped supporting all options for free remote streaming in the Plex apps, such as adding a custom server connection in the app settings. The company said at the time, “The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature.” That’s also when Plex introduced the Remote Watch Pass as a less expensive way to enable remote streaming again.
Plex is now rolling out the remote watch changes to its Roku TV app. If you have Plex Pass, or the owner of the server you’re streaming from has Plex Pass, you don’t need to do anything. Otherwise, if you are streaming on a different network from the server’s home network, you need Plex Pass or Remote Watch Pass.
Wow, could you get any more condescending? We bought a product (10+ years ago in my case) and it still works great. Why would I switch to an inferior service, just because the FREE version of the product I already bought got worse?
This has no impact on anyone that actually paid for Plex.
With this move the free version of Plex got downgraded, to now have feature parity with Jellyfin. Meaning a VPN is required if you want to access your media on the go
Privacy for me. When they where sending out emails about what you watched. Kind of made the we don’t know what’s on your server line a lie. So how could I trust them. I still expect a massive sting where they have to tell the MPAA or something who has pirated content and they go after people. Surprised it hasn’t happened yet seems so obvious.
I’m not sure if you’re joking or not, but you can remotely stream from Jellyfin without using a VPN.
You CAN, but you really shouldn’t. Even the documentation says as much. The Jellyfin server is way to insecure to expose it to the open internet. In reality you can’t safely use Jellyfin remotely without a vpn
What problems? The ones that everyone keeps posting which are not a big deal. Sure they should get fixed and a lot of them have been.
‘I paid for this shit, and I will not allow it to be disrespected’. Sounds too much like Microsoft and Google apologists.
It does not say that in the documentation. What the documentation does have, however, are extensive instructions on how to make Jellyfin accessible on WAN: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/reverse-proxy/
This is good to know, thanks for sharing. I’ve only got it local for now after installing at the weekend and wasn’t sure how secure it was for external access.