Plex has just announced Plex Cloud, which may be the simplest way to access all of your personal media from anywhere, without needing to leave a PC or NAS drive on all the time. Plex Cloud links a Plex Pass to an Amazon Cloud Drive account. This allows the Plex app to stream media directly from the Amazon Cloud Drive, without needing to have a PC or NAS running Plex’s server software.

Amazon’s Cloud Drive costs just $59.99 per year for unlimited storage. Add in the $39.99 per year cost of a Plex Pass and you’ve essentially got your own private streaming service for around the cost of a Netflix or Amazon Prime membership. Plex says not all the features of a standard Plex server are supported with a virtual server using Amazon Drive. For starters Camera Upload, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, Media Optimizer, DLNA, and DVR are currently not supported, but Plex says they’ll be working to add support for those over time.

My main concern is it doesn’t seem like Plex is working with Amazon to provide this service, and is instead just piggy-backing on Amazon Drive to make it work for their liking. Since Amazon Drive is primarily intended to be used as a backup service, it’ll be interesting to see how Amazon feels about Plex users using the service to stream multi-gigabyte files on a daily basis. I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon puts a stop to this, if in fact they weren’t consulted before the launch of Plex Cloud.

Plex Cloud is currently in closed beta through an invitation process which gives priority to those with a Plex Pass.

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