Plex to End Support for Podcasts on Friday

Plex is set to end support for podcasts on Friday, the company behind the media management platform has announced.
plex podcasts

Web Shows on the Plex media server will also close this week, the company said in a post on the Plex forum, although most of the content the section hosted will still be available to users elsewhere on the platform.

As part of our ongoing effort to make sure we're spending our time and energy in ways that best serve our awesome user community, we've made the decision to end support for Podcasts and Web Shows within Plex. We recognize this decision will impact several of you greatly, and we apologize for the inconvenience it will cause. You can continue to access these features within Plex until Friday, April 15th, 2022, at which point they will no longer be available.

Plex didn't say exactly why it had decided to end support for podcasts and close the Web Shows portal of its media management offering, but the wording suggests that neither section was being used enough to make them worth the time and money spent maintaining them.

For those who want to export their podcast subscription list in OPML format for use in other players, the Plex forum post provides instructions on how to go about it before support closes.

As noted by XDA Developers, Plex podcast support has largely stood still since it was introduced in 2018, and there are several complaints from users in the Plex forums about buggy performance and other issues going all the way back to its inception.

Tag: Plex

Popular Stories

iPhone 17 Pro Blue Feature Tighter Crop

iPhone 17 Pro Launching in Three Months With These 12 New Features

Saturday June 14, 2025 5:45 pm PDT by
The iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are three months away, and there are plenty of rumors about the devices. Below, we recap key changes rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro models as of June 2025:Aluminum frame: iPhone 17 Pro models are rumored to have an aluminum frame, whereas the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro models have a titanium frame, and the iPhone X through iPhone 14 Pro have a...
iPadOS 26 App Windowing

Apple Explains Why iPads Don't Just Run macOS

Friday June 13, 2025 7:46 am PDT by
iPadOS 26 allows iPads to function much more like Macs, with a new app windowing system, a swipe-down menu bar at the top of the screen, and more. However, Apple has stopped short of allowing iPads to run macOS, and it has now explained why. In an interview this week with Swiss tech journalist Rafael Zeier, Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi said that iPadOS 26's new Mac-like ...
Logitech Logo Feature

Logitech Announces Two New Accessories for WWDC

Friday June 13, 2025 7:22 am PDT by
Alongside WWDC this week, Logitech announced notable new accessories for the iPad and Apple Vision Pro. The Logitech Muse is a spatially-tracked stylus developed for use with the Apple Vision Pro. Introduced during the WWDC 2025 keynote address, Muse is intended to support the next generation of spatial computing workflows enabled by visionOS 26. The device incorporates six degrees of...
iphone 16 pro models 1

17 Reasons to Wait for the iPhone 17

Thursday June 12, 2025 8:58 am PDT by
Apple's iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models simultaneously, which is why we often get rumored features months ahead of launch. The iPhone 17 series is no different, and we already have a good idea of what to expect from Apple's 2025 smartphone lineup. If you skipped the iPhone...
iOS 26 Feature

Apple Seeds Revised iOS 26 Developer Beta to Fix Battery Issue

Friday June 13, 2025 10:15 am PDT by
Apple today provided developers with a revised version of the first iOS 26 beta for testing purposes. The update is only available for the iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 models, so if you're running iOS 26 on an iPhone 14 or earlier, you won't see the revised beta. Registered developers can download the new beta software through the Settings app on each device. The revised beta addresses an...
Mac Studio Feature

Apple Begins Selling Refurbished Mac Studio With M4 Max and M3 Ultra Chips at a Discount

Thursday June 12, 2025 10:14 am PDT by
Apple today added Mac Studio models with M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips to its online certified refurbished store in the United States, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and many European countries, for the first time since they were released in March. As usual for refurbished Macs, prices are discounted by approximately 15% compared to the equivalent new models on Apple's online store. Note that Apple's ...
m4 macbook air pink

Apple Now Selling Refurbished M4 MacBook Air Models

Friday June 13, 2025 3:34 pm PDT by
Apple today added M4 MacBook Air models to its refurbished store in the United States, making the latest MacBook Air devices available at a discounted price for the first time since they launched earlier this year. Both 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models are available, with Apple offering multiple capacities and configurations. The refurbished devices are discounted by approximately 15...

Top Rated Comments

W2u7Yw4HaD Avatar
42 months ago
Yeah, I didn't think it even supported podcasts until now.. But would never have been my go-to place for podcasts in the first place..
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
PeteBurgh Avatar
42 months ago

What the hell is Plex, anyway? Is is just a way to stream movies and other media from a NAS to an end-user device, or is there something more to it?
Well, therein lies the question. A lot of users (including myself) would like it to be the former: a server-client set up that allows me to access my own media. That is how it began. But there seems to be strong economic incentives (and maybe some user demand?) to make it a broader product that is also a gateway to all sorts of streaming content.

It does create a tension between different kinds of users (or current and potential future users?).

going from a sleek piece of Mac specific software to the current bloated Electron garbage
Unless I'm very much mistaken, the neither the player nor server apps use Electron.

I think it's a bit harsh to call it 'garbage'. For me it's somewhere between 'fine' and 'meh' - yeah, it's not very Mac-like (what is these days), but it's reasonably fast, easy to navigate, and doesn't hog loads of system resources. I like Infuse too.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Codestud Avatar
42 months ago
Yet they've spent a ton of time adding this "Discover" content aggregator thing, which I looked at once and immediately turned off. I don't want Plex as a content aggregator for online services. It's for my local media on my server and that's it.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Zorn Avatar
42 months ago
Actually glad about this, Plex is an amazing app for the things it's focused toward. The podcasts support was never very good anyway, and I'm not sure who was looking to Plex for this functionality in the first place. There are many superior dedicated apps. The web shows thing is 100% good riddance, I didn't need more advertising filled junk that was never asked for.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
kingtj1971 Avatar
42 months ago

What the hell is Plex, anyway? Is is just a way to stream movies and other media from a NAS to an end-user device, or is there something more to it?
It's just what you suggest, in the same way the game of baseball is "some guys running around a field trying to catch a ball someone whacks with a piece of wood". :)

I mean, it's essentially a product that consists of both a "server" and a "client" piece. The "Plex Media Server" runs on a machine configured for it and lets you store a collection of video and audio content that it indexes/catalogs and can then stream optimally to a Plex "client" -- which can be software running on a Windows PC, a Mac, an iPad/iPhone, Android device, or built into various smart TVs on the market or set-top boxes like Apple TV.

It works on your local network or can stream over the Internet, supporting "user accounts" you create on the server so specific people you know can be granted access to parts of, or to your complete library of content.

As time went on, the Plex authors kept bolting on new features, so it went from focusing on your own personal video, music or photo collections to supporting all these Internet-based streaming options and even broadcast TV if you have the right TV tuner board installed in a Plex server. Podcast support is another one of those things they added to fill out the offerings a Plex client gave people....
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
_Spinn_ Avatar
42 months ago
I never liked the way Plex implemented podcasts. I wish the files were downloaded to my Plex server and served from there that way I could keep an archive of my favorite podcasts with the rest of my digital media.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)