Plex has confirmed that it will require a Remote Watch Pass or Plex Pass for remote streaming on its TV apps. The change is going into effect for the Roku app first, followed by all other TV apps and third-party clients in 2026.
Earlier this year, Plex increased its pricing for Plex Pass and stopped supporting all options for free remote streaming in the Plex apps, such as adding a custom server connection in the app settings. The company said at the time, “The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature.” That’s also when Plex introduced the Remote Watch Pass as a less expensive way to enable remote streaming again.
Plex is now rolling out the remote watch changes to its Roku TV app. If you have Plex Pass, or the owner of the server you’re streaming from has Plex Pass, you don’t need to do anything. Otherwise, if you are streaming on a different network from the server’s home network, you need Plex Pass or Remote Watch Pass.
Do you give friends and family access to your library? If so, how?
There’s a few ways, but it’s similar to hosting anything yourself. You could, if you’re not too bothered by it, just forward the port that jellyfin is using. You do this in your routers settings and you can see/change the port in jellyfins settings. Then you give your friends the device that’s hosting jellyfin’s ip address and they type it in when logging into the app. That’s simple and quick and not secure at all. But it’s really one of those things that 99 times out of 100 it’s fine.
You can use something like tailscale to connect your friends devices to your network, I didn’t do it so I don’t really know the details, but you’d need it installed on all of their clients. This is (probably) the most secure way but it’s a pain in the butt for users, compared to other ways. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/tailscale/
I ended up using nginx as a reverse proxy, and bought a domain name so I could just tell people “go into jellyfin wherever you want and type in domain.com, then pick the profile I made you.” I was really new to this nginx thing when I did it, so I don’t have a deep understanding of why it’s better than just forwarding the port but it is.