Plex can now organize and play your movies from Amazon’s cloud

Plex wants you to have all your digital movies available on your Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nvidia Shield whenever you need it without having to maintain expensive storage drives and finicky routers.

The company revealed today that it is partnering with Amazon to power the new Plex Cloud service that is live now as an invite-only beta. This new premium offering from Plex enables you to keep an unlimited number of movies, television shows, and movies stored on a remote Amazon server that is always on and ready to serve up your content to your gaming consoles and other devices. Plex is already one of the top services for organizing your personal media, and now it wants to remove the step that causes the most headaches: running your own local server. This means that even total novices can start their own version of Netflix or Hulu with the content they own without having to buy a 4TB hard drive and without having to keep a PC or Shield running 24/7.

Up until this point, Plex was primarily for power users who own a lot of media. The company made an effort to ensure its product is friendly, but it’s not really for the typical consumer. It’s something I’ve done, and I love it. But it’s not an option I’ve ever suggested to other people because it’s way more difficult than logging into Netflix. Plex Cloud could solve that simply by removing the hardware requirement.

Plex Cloud does require both a Plex Pass membership and an Amazon Drive account. The premium Plex Pass goes for $5 per month, $40 per year, or $150 for a lifetime membership. Unlimited Amazon Drive storage is $60 per year. While that cost could build up over time, it does come with some obvious benefits over running your own hardware.

Storage is not cheap. A large reliable hard drive can easily cost you more than $150. And that space is finite and is susceptible to failure. Amazon Cloud is unlimited in most countries, and it is also much less likely to lose your movies and pictures to corrupted data. If you are regularly expanding your media library or your vault of home videos and personal pictures, going with Plex Cloud could save you money and it could save you from losing important files.