After watching movies and series on TV or disc for quite a long while I have tried a handful of streaming services over the last few years. I like and dislike them at the same time.

While it is very convenient to start watching almost anything with just a couple of clicks and no annoying trailers before the main movie it became rather tedious to search through all the services to find which one of them actually offers the thing I am currently wanting to watch. Quite often I was even out of luck completely. Most times because I am stuck to the offerings of the local Japanese market. Globalization is something content providers obviously don’t want to hear from.

So I got sick of streaming services and went back to buying the discs. Except that I didn’t get rid of streaming altogether. After trying it a couple weeks, I eventually got a lifetime license for Plex, a media server meant to be ran on your own computer. I installed it on a local machine where I keep my copied my movie library (which isn’t so big anyway). It offers clients for all major systems and even is capable of syncing movies to my iOS devices for watching even when no network connection is available.

It can be setup to stream outside of the local home network. Not only for movies, but also music. So instead of just replacing the likes of Netflix and Hulu, Plex also takes the place of Spotify and Apple Music. Sure, it won’t allow me to discover a lot of new music — but I’m not the target group for that anyway as I am quit happy with what I accumulated over my lifetime so far and most of the time listening to Podcasts anyway.

The most impact Plex shows when there are children in the house. The want to watch their favorites series over and over again and usually have no patience to sit through disc loading and advertisement times. And even when the internet connection is unavailable all local content can stream anyway.