Your recommendations more-or-less came to fruition as the company Plex.

I find the dichotomy quite interesting. Fundamentally, there aren't too many differences between the two, and yet Plex has no stigma associated with it. It's a pretty limited space to work in. Long term, I don't see how Plex's business model works. Since they don't control the media, they don't really control anything. There's only limited appetite for transcoding software.

In my view that's one of it's strengths, they make a good product that is best in class for the their niche. I'm happy they're trying to expand with features rather than some content bid. Plex doesn't have a stigma because you can't use it to actually pirate content.

I don't think Plex will ever be a huge company but you don't need to be in order to succeed.

>best in class for the their niche

I find plex to be quite buggy and opaque. It is tolerable for the few things that it does, but that's mostly because it's a niche, and there isn't that much competition in this space. I don't know how emby is doing these days.

>trying to expand with features

Their expansion efforts are also not that scalable, again because they can't control content. They recently added integration with tuner boxes and dvr, but that whole segment is on its way out. Not to mention, various other issues with the inability to handle DRM and other copyright restrictions that come with cable. They also tried some cloud drive integration, which again didn't pan out, because they don't control the storage. I think they've tried to bundle some news and podcasts, which is marginal at best. In this space, I just don't see how you can make money unless you are selling content, storage or compute. Plex sells none of these. At the end of the day, it's some glue software that probably calls ffmpeg to transcode.

Plex relies on a backend server, on your LAN, to work. So you can't sell standalone Plex boxes, or if you did, it would have to include both the server and the client together, and the server requires a reasonably powerful system. A Raspberry Pi wouldn't be good enough.

You can run the server and client on the same box. It's just pointless for that use case, because Kodi can do that better. Plex is useful for transcoding for different clients. Besides, Plex is proprietary and can't be sold without permission. However, the point I was making was that all these things are for watching primarily pirated media, but Plex doesn't have the stigma. Plex was originally a fork of xbmc btw.

Plex doesn't have the stigma because you can't use Plex to actually pirate content. You don't really feel a difference between Kodi and it's plugins.

And yet, Plex is still used mainly for watching pirated content.

> aggressively litigate people using your trademark for unlocked devices.

This requires enormous amounts of time and money that the XBMC foundation doesn't have.