As lousy as Plex (both the company and the product) have become, there really aren't alternatives with feature-parity available. Jellyfin is starting to get there in terms of basic media center functionality, but still faces stability and platform compatibility issues that have been long-solved by Plex. Jellyfin also lags behind in ecosystem support/integration for those of us operating media servers with heavy amounts of automation and dependencies on workflows executed by 3rd party packages.

Infuse https://firecore.com/infuse

Client is available for Apple ecosystem only.

Don't all Jelly Fin solutions still lack proper intro skip. There are some hacky plugins but nothing like Plex or Netflix on the TV.

Emby has intro skip now

Here's my data point: I use Jellyfin and I am satisfied with it.

My use case: movies and TV shows, streaming from mobile, PC, or smart TV with auto-downloaded subtitles and varying stream quality. Heavy use of the "watch together" feature. (Plex watch together is horrible compared to Jellyfin.)

What is particularly lousy about Plex as a product? Overall I'm quite satisfied with it, it's gotten better over the past few years noticeably I felt with the downloads actually working, collections, more suggestions, etc... I will say the genre filter for movies/shows is quite useless though.

where "my data" means a record of the shows i watch.

i'm okay with that. the shows i watch don't need to be a secret. i want advertisers to know what i watch, so more of that sort of TV gets made. If Plex can make money off this information, and give me a good service in exchange for that, it seems like an arrangement that benefits us both. what's the problem?

There is a difference between

* 20 million people watched show X-Episode 5, and

* notatoad watched show X-Episode 5 on 28-July-2023 at 8pm. We can also correlate that that they used UberEats to order Thai Cuisine at 7 pm on the same day, and that a certain group he belongs to was Y% more likely to buy the product placed within that show.

The second kind of information will be used in the future against you, to extract the maximum amount of money from you for services that "you just can't miss", after being bombarded with ads and social media influencers in sufficient quantity.

I used to order Chinese take out to watch every new episode of Burn Notice. I’m not concerned about companies knowing this and using it “against me” in targeted advertising.

this sounds pretty excellent. i wish some advertiser had suggested this to me when burn notice was still on the air.

The point of correlating data has already been brought up, but ultimately no answer will be satisfactory.

Some people consider it a problem and some people don’t.

The former is more sensitive to their data being collected and leveraged and the latter “has nothing to hide” or simply prefers targeted ads.

Some are against manipulation attempts with the goal to be parted with their money and others go all in on “personal responsibility”.

They’re entirely incompatible positions and any debate back and forth would be a waste of time of both parties.