Plex, a service for streaming video and other media from a home PC or NAS device, has teamed up with Amazon to help customers stream their content from the cloud.
Plex is a great tool for making movies, music, and photos available to just about any device, whether you're at home or traveling. But the home computer that holds your Plex content must be powered on and connected to the Internet in order for it to work. A power failure or Internet outage at home could thus leave a Plex user without any streaming content when they're traveling.
Plex Cloud, announced today, could solve that problem. "Plex Cloud eliminates the need to run your own local Plex Media Server and manage an always-on computer or NAS," the announcement said. "Let Amazon worry about nasty stuff like power failure, corruption, and data loss. It turns out they’re pretty good at that stuff!"
Plex Cloud is not yet generally available, but there's a signup page for customers who want to request one of the limited spots in the beta trial.
Plex will continue to let customers store media at home, just as they always have. Even the free version of Plex offers unlimited streaming from a home server, while the premium "Plex Pass" unlocks extra features for $5 a month, $40 a year, or $150 for a lifetime pass. (£4, £32, and £120 respectively.)
Plex Cloud will only work if you have paid for a Plex Pass. You'll also need enough Amazon Drive storage—an Amazon Prime subscription comes with 5GB for video, music, and other files, while unlimited storage costs another $60 a year (£55 in the UK).
With Plex, media you upload to Amazon will form a separate library from the one you store at home. "This is a completely separate, independent 'Plex Media Server' and not a copy of the one you run locally," Plex said.
There's no word on whether Plex Cloud will support Dropbox, Microsoft's OneDrive, or Google Drive, but Plex left the door open for supporting non-Amazon storage services. "We’ll continue to evaluate adding support for other cloud storage providers over time," Plex said.
The Plex Cloud beta will add features over time, but initially it won't support some Plex features such as offline sync and DVR capability.
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