Plex will stop supporting Amazon Cloud Drive after December 31st
Context & Ripple Effects
Plex Cloud only launched three months earlier as a partnership with Amazon that let Plex Pass subscribers run a media server without owning hardware, built on their Amazon Drive accounts. Within days of this announcement, Plex had hedged by adding Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox support to the same service while openly acknowledging problems with the Amazon integration.
The cutoff lands at year-end, giving Amazon-backed users a two-week migration window onto rival clouds. The episode foreshadowed both endpoints of the arc: Plex would shut down Plex Cloud entirely in 2018, citing costs, and Amazon would eventually retire Drive itself.
First-order effects
- Plex Cloud subscribers who stored media on Amazon Drive must migrate their libraries to Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or local hardware before December 31st or lose the hardware-free setup they signed up for weeks ago.
- Amazon loses one of its highest-profile third-party consumer integrations for Drive right as Plex publicly flags the integration as troubled.
Second-order effects
- Because Plex now supports multiple clouds, switching costs collapse for affected users — Google and Microsoft gain an easy landing spot for customers Amazon's own service failed to hold.
- The episode raises the operating cost question that would ultimately kill the product: maintaining a media-transcoding layer across several third-party storage providers proved expensive enough that Plex exited the business within two years.
Third-order effects
- Apps built on rented consumer cloud storage inherit the provider's strategic whims — a structural risk that pushes such services toward either owned infrastructure or providers committed to storage long-term.
- Consumer cloud storage consolidates around what each big platform actually wants to sell — Amazon later refocused on photo and video storage via Amazon Photos rather than general-purpose Drive files — leaving general-purpose storage partners like Plex stranded.
The trend: General-purpose consumer cloud storage is being abandoned by its own providers in favor of narrower photo-and-video plays, forcing dependent app makers onto multi-cloud strategies or out of the business.