[Sytten]

People on HN always complain about this. But the reality is that the one time payment you (maybe) gave for Plex is not enough to make a viable company. So they have to offer complementary products and for that you need an online account.

Normal people also want to have features like remote streaming, subtitles fetching, familly sharing, etc which are hard to do without centralized accounts. Not even mentionning securing your paid features which you have to do to survive. And that customer doesn't care about the login as long as it is up.

I don't anything plex could do to please this particular demand would ever be enough so for me they do well to ignore it since removing that would effectively kill their business.

[koheripbal]

I run a lot of self-hosted software services, many of which have their own internal account system and auth. None of the features you mentioned require 3rd party cloud based auth.

I did pay for Plex prior to the cloud auth change, so for me it's a bait and switch, but my concerns are much more about privacy.

One day Plex will be bought by a large media company, and my (and my kids') viewing data and library catalogue data will be owned by MGM, Disney, Fox, etc...