For an excellent product, I am glad that Plex is charging an appropriate amount. Software development time, basic hosting for software downloads and login services are not free. The Plex clients getting onto so many different platforms I also imagine is quite a bear to get under control. Then, open-source alternatives still require overhead and maintenance from an admin - consider the $ spent with Plex the cost of your time.

There will always be inflation, and this does not seem like an excessive increase for "lifetime" membership. That being said, I am cautious of other "lifetime" memberships which have failed :

- American Airlines - AAirpass : scrapped when people took massive advantage of the number of flights, tied to a person
- TiVo DVR All-In Plan : scrapped when physical time-shifting media products were no longer feasible, the "license" was tied to the device
- Unlimited Web Hosting : scrapped when people really used the unlimited webhosts for unlimited data transfers, hidden limits are typically enforced to kick off the worst offenders.

- probably a lot more ...

Notably, some have really succeeded! ( and there are many more examples) :
- US National Parks Service - $80 Senior Lifetime pass ( must be over 62 to qualify ), tied to your death like you would expect.
- REI - $30 - a lot of in-store perks, and returns.
- Forever Stamps - fixed cost of mailing letters.
- etc ..

Here's to a lifetime membership that thrives!

You could mitigate this by doing the transfer in multiple wavelengths of light. This way if one wavelength is blocked, the others can be used for error correction, or to replace the "lost" information. ECC is pretty quick and there are more complex options if you need to get higher levels of recovery more often.

This company mission I am really interested in, and know loads about. I will be applying to your company's careers page !

"DIS beats earnings by 21%, streaming $293M in profit -- over $1B profit/yr. Total subscribers dis/hulu/espn 234M vs netflix 300M"

Here's a breakdown, it's very bullish.

https://www.investors.com/news...

While they lost subscribers, this was offset by the number of subscribers that stayed and kept paying through the price hike. So, yeah, "lost subscribers = bad", but from a business standpoint they gained somewhere near $1B in recurring revenue from the price hikes. The loss of these customers is not likely to be a deterrent.

Expect the DIS stock to rise in the coming months.

Yeah, have to say I have a lot of ethernet connected devices, but wifi, not so much.

16 ports on the 10gbps router are full, and an 8-port switch has a couple devices on it. The only thing on wifi are the things that need to be handheld / travel - like phones and laptops. And only the laptop when it's physically in a lap, not when it's connected over ethernet like it usually is.

I do have a few wireless IoT smart plugs, and those are wireless (2.4Ghz), but I wish they were not. My stance is anything that is in a fixed location is ethernet, anything that is mobile is wireless. This results in much less mess.

Hey OP, the definition of astronaut was been changed in recent years because of space tourists like this person. Please refer to the person who went into space as some kind of space tourist. Here's the article on the reclassification : https://www.nbcnews.com/scienc...

I'm disappointed that the term astronaut is getting devalued like this.

I thought this was common knowledge at this point, but I guess not. The "technology" isn't AI or Computer Vision at all. It's 1000s of people sitting in India watching video screens tracking people around stores! This was called out back in April 2024.

I can't believe that people want to support this type of technology -- it's just pinning low-cost workers in other countries to a screen, how terrible.

Title : "Amazon's AI Stores Seemed Too Magical. And They Were.
The 1,000 contractors in India working on the company’s Just Walk Out technology offer a stark reminder that AI isn’t always what it seems."
https://www.bloomberg.com/opin...

And further digging, Bloomberg quotes Amazon in saying that a "small minority" of checkouts were verified by humans, but that's not true either. From Business Standard - Amazon is reporting 700 of every 1000 checkouts was verified by workers. That's 70% human powered !!

https://www.business-standard....

Source Quote:
""
The company said that the technology was driven entirely by computer vision, However, a significant portion of "Just Walk Out" sales required manual review by the team in India. In 2022, the report said that 700 out of every 1,000 "Just Walk Out" transactions were verified by these workers. Following this, an Amazon spokesperson said that the India-based team only assisted in training the model used for "Just Walk Out".

The spokesperson said, "Associates may also validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual's purchases."

The e-commerce company plans to phase out "Just Walk Out" technology at its Amazon Fresh stores in favour of its Dash Carts. The smart shopping carts will allow customers to avoid checkout lines by tracking and charging for their selections. A spokesperson said that this service is being launched as customers desired features such as easily locating nearby products and deals, viewing their receipts while shopping, and knowing their savings.
Amazon's "Just Walk Out" technology first debuted in Amazon Go convenience stores, where it helped customers to enter by identifying themselves with their Amazon account, pick up items, return items to shelves, and walk out with their final selections without interacting with a cashier.
""

BASIC

The best bang for your $, with minimum time investment is a Synology NAS. You slap some drives in there, plug it in and it just works. Click a few button on the web interface and you have it serving up across multiple types of local file sharing, with room to do other things like run a Plex server to serve up that media content. Combining this with a VPN, and the backups you're talking about can be done from anywhere. Without the VPN, machines can run LAN backups when configured from windows, and there is timemachine capability for the Macs.

ADVANCED

As for the Advanced setup, snag a server-class chassis 4U with the CPUs, and RAM inside from someplace like eBay, you'll likely spend between $500-$800. This is surprisingly cheap, and will probably cost you much less than the Synology. Pickup a compatible HBA PCI card with as many PCI lanes as your motherboard can put out in one of its PCI slots (like a LSI SAS3008) ~$50 , and the right SAS or SATA cables to attach to your drives, ~$40(?).

Next, Snag some inexpensive enterpise 3.5" drives from serverpartdeals.com for your storage setup ( $225 for a 20TB Seagate drive is really cheap, buy at least 2 , I recommend 5 so you can do ZFS RAIDZ2 ). Snag at least one SSD drive depending on what the motherboard supports or the operating system installation, NVME may be another option if you choose a modern motherboard.

Install Linux on the beast, and run ZFS. Use the /dev/disk/by-id/ names for the ZFS tank you setup.. Enable NFS for the Macs, install Samba for the Windows machines. Install Plex server for the media and you are READY.

  If it's too loud, snag an enclosure the Trip-Lite ones are quite nice. I purchased a cheaper silencing cabinet and have regretted not spending more $.

References:

HBA Adapter
https://www.storagereview.com/...
note - this review is 10 years old ! The equipment is still good, but there might be slightly better HBA cards out there. Look for PCI Gen 4.

You may need to get the chassis separately ( $200 ):

Supermicro 2U Server 12 Caddy Bay 3.5 LFF E ATX Storage Chassis SAS2 6GBPS Rail
https://www.ebay.com/itm/15488...

HDDs:
https://serverpartdeals.com/co...

Silent Rack
https://tripplite.eaton.com/sm...

Good luck !