[yellow_viper]

So uh, how does this work? What's to stop me from sticking my data up there and sharing it with 1000 friends? Where is the trancoding done?

I was a member of a private plex group with about 8TB of media. He was constantly running into problems due to people sharing accounts, causing his server load to become unfeasible.

[awinder]

Transcoding is done in the cloud when required (some containers & encoding formats don't require transcoding, some do). There's a 3 concurrent stream limit when the device needs transcoding, so that might put a hamper on your 1K friends.

[dsacco]

I have a pretty large collection of media (double digit TB of ripped blurays and lossless music). I solved that by IP whitelisting access to my Plex port at the router level for my home. All friends who I share this with sign up for their own account, and once I share my library with that account I also set a rule that requires it to be whitelisted.

[teilo]

Because you would have to give your 1000 friends the Plex login to your paid Plex account, and this would likely be noticed and your account suspended.

[bubblethink]

I don't think that's necessary. They can all have their own logins. Plex allows coarse sharing for free and more fine grained sharing in their paid product.

[lobster_johnson]

That's not how Plex works. A library can be shared with any number of users that you invite into your account.