TBF, Plex has 2 things going for it that are tough to do without an account and use of their servers:
Near-zero-config sharing of your media library remotely and with other users
Being able to have media from all available sources (friends, other servers) available together in a single dashboard view
With that in mind, I can understand why they would default to requiring an account. Before I spun up my own media server, I was a user on 2 friends’ Plex accounts, and it was indeed nice to have that seamless access to both sources. But once they started requiring everyone involved to have a paid account, I noped out to Jellyfin.
A local account-free option, with the ability to later upgrade to a “cloud” account, would have been awesome. Clearly that was not their business model though.
TBF, Plex has 2 things going for it that are tough to do without an account and use of their servers:
With that in mind, I can understand why they would default to requiring an account. Before I spun up my own media server, I was a user on 2 friends’ Plex accounts, and it was indeed nice to have that seamless access to both sources. But once they started requiring everyone involved to have a paid account, I noped out to Jellyfin.
A local account-free option, with the ability to later upgrade to a “cloud” account, would have been awesome. Clearly that was not their business model though.