Plex is a mostly free piece of software that anyone can use to build netflix and spotify clones in a few clicks. Leveraging the power of plex, I was able to build a movie server in a few seconds. It was probably less than 10 minutes worth of work. Over the last month I’ve loaded it with 2,800 movies, 219 television series and mini series, and nearly 70,000 audio tracks.

To put things in perspective, a recent list of total available movies on Netflix was right around 4,000. How I came to acquire this much content is a tale for another time. Some of it came from my physical collection and some others came from playoncloud, some older movies were found on the internet archive.

The benefits of running your own netflix like service are numerous. You learn a new skill, a new piece of software, some networking fundamentals, and you have total control over your library. When you own a copy of the content, you don’t have to worry about content leaving to a new network or disappearing all together. Since the content is being streamed from my pc on my network, there are no outages or service interruptions, and I can watch plex even if the internet is down for some reason. Running a plex server is also basically free, which may allow you to cancel more costly monthly subscriptions.

Setting it up was not difficult and I think just about anyone could do it. My plans for the server at this point, continue acquiring data and self hosting it locally to reduce my web traffic footprint. I already host my own password vault and blog (not locally). The next steps I want to take are to build a web server with a reverse proxy and dns server so that I can host a website, my password service, an open source version of chatgpt and stable diffusion, a searx or whoogle instance (search engine), and a plemora server (twitter alternative).

Adding these services will allow me to self host the web services I use the most for every day browsing. We’ll see.