I don't understand. What does Plex care if it's hosted on a cloud IaaS provider or on own equipment or VM? It's not Plex's business to police what I or anyone else does with software. If someone is selling access to pirated content using Plex, the solution is to handle the cases individually rather than kindergarten class punishment of particular server providers.
Plex is trying to reinvent itself, 10 years too late, as the next Roku. By changing the product's focus and drumming up anti-piracy PR like this, they're whitewashing the brand. That's why every major update of the software takes it farther from the thing you purchased (a nice frontend for your downloaded movie collection) and closer to something you don't want -- a bunch of recommendations for streaming services you've never heard of, while burying your media library ever deeper in the default UI.
It's yet another form of Cory Doctrow's enshittification.
Five years from now, Plex will have gone public or been acquired, probably by Facebook so that we can have Facebook TV for a couple years before that shuts down. The original Plex userbase will have long left for a better product.
I don't understand. What does Plex care if it's hosted on a cloud IaaS provider or on own equipment or VM? It's not Plex's business to police what I or anyone else does with software. If someone is selling access to pirated content using Plex, the solution is to handle the cases individually rather than kindergarten class punishment of particular server providers.