Selfhosted

(sits in his Lamborghini Plex while a beautiful blonde gives him a handy) I'm fine, mate. Maybe later.

But then how will you know how much they love the smell of their own farts?

Because its more polished, has more platforms for clients to run on, and can be remotely shared with a simple account login and no configuration required. To name a few.

I set up Plex on my mum's TV and she can just push play. The UI is intuitive (read: familiar) to her.

Jellyfin has a reputation for giving users more control and customizability, but the other side of that coin is that it's more "fiddly".

My users don't want to fiddle.

Because I don't have to learn about things like proxies to try and open the service up outside my network in a secure manner or try to explain to family they need to run tailscale at the same time and then inevitably have to provide tech support for another aspect of "why is this not working?"

I just check allow remote access and it just works and I can go about my day doing things I enjoy more because fucking about with Linux and providing tech support are pretty low on that list for me :)

Plex is more polished, jellyfin is basically functional but we use Plex in our household because we watch movies all the time. I have my own personal jellyfin server on an old computer

I paid 79€ almost a decade ago. I got more than my moneys worth. Even the current lifetime (on sale) is less than a year of Netflix. More expensive than piracy + Jellyfin ofc if that’s your benchmark 😀

I have a Jellyfin instance running anyway, I’ll switch to that if Plex enshittifies.

*only for external streaming.

You can cut it off from the internet and stream in your house locally for free still.

End from any external streaming perspective, they are hosting a repository with your connection and port info, so your external friends can connect without you needing to manually configure or update their settings when you make a local change. Plus they are hosting stream relays for those that are unable to make a direct connection. To me, seems fair they'd ask for payment for that service.