I've been using Plex for probably 5 years now and it's the best (only?) software I know of for its purpose, but I haven't seen it "getting better and better" as you say. From my perspective it's had more or less the same useful functionality since I started using it, and my biggest annoyances with it -- the overall flakiness of the apps, syncing, and Chromecast integration, as compared with Netflix -- haven't gotten any better.

But I'm still really glad it exists and don't really feel I have much right to complain about a free (for me) product.

(Edit: okay, to give credit where it's due, I just remembered they did actually fix my biggest annoyance with the iOS app -- previously when you deleted a downloaded video it didn't actually delete it from disk -- there was no way to recover the storage, other than deleting the app itself. So I'd have to reinstall the app every time I took a flight more or less. But they fixed that, you can actually delete things now.)

> only

https://emby.media/

https://jellyfin.media/

https://kodi.tv/

https://mrmc.tv/

https://firecore.com/infuse

I have never heard of mrmc or infuse, but aren't they (along with Kodi) essentially just media _players_? And as much as I want to use jellyfin, it's not exactly ready on the platforms I want to use it for (although it's in the works). That leaves Emby, which doesn't have nearly the polish (although I just switched to it and an very happy with it). Not exactly a huge selection of choices...

Kodi is definitely more than a player, it's a full media library. If it doesn't do what you want out of the box (and it mostly does, categorising and metadata etc.), then plugins can handle the rest.

I've tested and used all of these. Emby was a slightly different Plex with several weakneses and some strengths. It was free, now its fremium like Plex. None of the others have native applications for both android and iOS. Infuse is nice if you have an all iOS ecosystem.

update - Kodi has an iOS application if you have a jailbroken an iPhone with iOS 8.

I've been using Plex for a good 3 or 4 years now, and have upgraded through a good half dozen or so version upgrades. What disappointed me the most is that their support for subtitles has gotten progressively worse over time. I did all the tricks to try and make subtitles work, whether embedded or not, but in the end I found it easier just to navigate to the folder on my NAS and open the .mkv in VLC, which recognises embedded subtitles no problem!

I used mediatomb ages ago, and now Kodi (formerly XBMC). Works great.

Yes, and that's the main reason I use Plex nowadays. I mostly stopped using it as virtually everything I want to watch is on legal streaming services in the UK. However even when content is available, on some services the UX is so awful I'm driven to download it elsewhere. For example, even though Handmaid's Tale is available on All4 in the UK, their app and player are so awful it was easier to go through the rigmarole of illegal downloads so I can use Plex instead.

The Netflix UI is atrocious. It feeds the same content in a loop. I never seem to find anything and much prefer HBO Go's UI wich reverse sorts content by date.

On my new Samsung tv, the Netflix app also has a SUPER annoying auto play trailer feature THAT YOU CANNOT DISABLE. I am just trying to scroll through the list and literally everything I stop on immediately starts playing audio/video content. Absolutely horrible design that has greatly diminished my experience to the point where I almost don't want to use it anymore. The only way I've managed to cope is to keep the TV muted until I actually select something and try to avoid looking at the video preview that often contains spoilers.

there has not been a single time when "watch again" was useful to me, why is that even there?

Sadly, the UI seems designed to force you watch Netflix content, and hide the fact the catalog is small (is it? I can't tell).

It's the number one reason I'm going to drop netflix, when I get too fed up.

Children live to watch the same shows multiple times.

indeed, but they have a "kids" account for that :)

I actually get the impression that the catalog IS small from the current Netflix UI.

HBO go on anything but a PC is painful to use. Continue watching is completely broken on the xbox app. The whole thing feels like it's 10 years old with all the mistakes and clunkiness. Instead of a nice xbox native keyboard popup to search, you literally scroll through the entire alphabet and it's barely responsive.

The HBO Go app is buggy but the UI is better, despite feeling older IMHO. On Apple devices is works okay save for some old iPad where it fails randomly.

Is it only me but Plex never worked stably on tvOS. The transcoding stops every 20 minutes and the movie freeze, forcing me to restart it. I suspect it's only with the mkv container and when using subtitles... Besides that, it forces you to transcode, and you need to subscribe to have native decoding. I use Plex for many years, even wrote and published plug-ins for it, but I could never convince me to subscribe. There are too many quirks that make me think let's wait until it works...

According to one of Jaron Lanier's books, the 'musician as a middle class job' has pretty much vanished because of all the piracy and streaming services. Plex is wonderful, but its nice that people can make a good living making the content too.

I'm going to have to agree with the other people who have commented so far. Music has never really been a middle class job. But I'm going to disagree with the entire premise that streaming and piracy have killed the middle class musician. I'm going to argue that streaming and piracy created the middle class musician.

Are there people living middle class lives in the music industry? Sure. Probably more today than ever before, and streaming (and possibly piracy) has a lot to do with that. Musicians don't make money from album sales, they make money from live shows. The middle class musician tours constantly because that's their full time job. It's not a 9-5, and you're not home with your family at night. I'm absolutely positive that this is the reason more people don't live middle class musician lifestyles.

Vanished? Nah. Never existed, at least not in any significant way. It's only now due to the Internet that small time niche musicians can make any money and get any sales without major labels. And major labels aren't in the business of making middle class musicians, as Jaron Lanier pointed out.

I'm also going to detour to your source... Jaron Lanier is famous for writing the story "Piracy is your friend", and a few years later writing "Pay me for my content". I would take Jaron Lanier's music industry opinions with a grain of salt.

Define significant. Session musicians were definitely a thing that earned a middle-class lifestyle during the last century, at least in larger markets. Of course, samplers and sample libraries likely had a larger impact on reducing the viability of that lifestyle (no need to hire everyone necessary for the string section on these three tracks when Kontakt and the one intern who knows his way around automating expressions will do), but shrinking studio budgets due to the impact of piracy helped put the nail in the coffin.

Is there actual data on this? I did not think the tail of professional musicians was ever fat enough to support a sizeable middle class. Mostly just a handful of megastars (who today are indeed capturing a smaller fraction of the value they create) and a large population of struggling musicians that have always supported themselves through other means.

He says he 'went looking for them.' I dug around a bit and there's not a lot of really concrete numbers. Here's what I found:

> Since 2000, the number of full-time songwriters in Nashville has fallen by 80 percent, according to the Nashville Songwriters Association International

https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01...

> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 39,260 people in the United States classified as “Musicians and Singers.” This is down 27% from 53,940 in 2002.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...

> At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s.[13] Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research.[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry

> For many musicians, the income derived from sound recordings is a small part of their overall revenue pie, and it’s decreasing. In aggregate, 88% of survey respondents derived between 0% and 10% of their music-related income from sound recordings in the past 12 months. Respondents who identified themselves as composers and/or recording artists were making a bit more, as were rock and hip hop musicians, but even when examined through various lenses like role or genre, income from sound recordings hovered under 15% of music-related income. Though differences exist by role and/or genre, the survey data suggests that income from sound recordings is a modest slice of most musicians’ income pies – a sentiment also expressed by a number of interviewees.

http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/

also relevant for the TV industry:

> According to the Writers Guild Association – West, screenwriters’ earnings were down nearly 25 percent in 2013 from 2009.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...

Thanks! The first quote is indeed a useful bit of evidence. the second one doesn't help us distinguish from the alternative hypothesis where almost all musician income is collected by a very small number of very wealthy people, with few middle class people in the first place.

It was interesting trying to find reliable stats on this. I might look into it more one day in the future

Music, along with other creative endeavors, is primarily a recreational pursuit. It's not socially necessary labor. A century of paying for the physical media necessary to transmit worthless (in a non-perjorative sense) ideas tricked many of us into thinking we were buying music itself. The true value of art reveals itself when these media are removed from the equation.

It's a net good for culture in the grand scheme of things. I'm hoping most professions eventually vanish along with musicians, including my own.

Music is like writing: the tools to create and distribute it have such low barriers to entry now that any sufficiently talented person can compete with the best in the industry.

Film isn't there yet. A solo director can't produce a Marvel movie on their own. But it's becoming easier every day.

Most musicians make their bread on tour or gigging.

Most musicians tour? Hmm. I don't have stats, but I doubt 95%+ of musicians ever tour, or hardly ever. The vast majority of musicians I know (musician here) pay their bills, support their kids etc by regular teaching, supplemented by gigs. Virtually all gigs are very low-paying compared to a few decades ago. A bass player friend told me that in a big city music venue, in the 1980s he was making 10x what the bar staff were; now they get paid more per hour.