Plex started in December 2007 as one developer’s side project to bring XBMC, the open-source media center now known as Kodi, to Mac OS X. Eighteen years and around $130 million in venture funding later, it’s a private company running both self-hosted server software and its own ad-supported streaming service.
Note: this is the origin story, not a setup walkthrough. If you want to actually install Plex, our Plex Server Setup guide covers Docker, Windows, and NAS installs step by step, or see the Plex app fiche for the quick facts.
A Mac hobby project born out of an XBMC gap (2007-2008)
In December 2007, developer Elan Feingold started porting XBMC, the open-source media center that would later be renamed Kodi, to Mac OS X. XBMC had no official Mac version at the time, so Feingold built one for himself as a freeware side project, posting his progress on the XBMC community forums as he went.
That progress caught the attention of Cayce Ullman and Scott Olechowski, two software executives who had recently sold their previous company to Cisco and were independently looking into porting XBMC to the Mac themselves. They reached out to Feingold, offered support and funding, and the three of them formed a team in January 2008. The project was called OSXBMC, and the plan at the time was eventual full integration into XBMC itself.
That plan didn’t last. The team kept syncing their Mac port with the Linux-based XBMC codebase until May 21, 2008, when differences in direction led them to fork the code entirely and publish it on GitHub as its own project. In July 2008, they renamed it: Plex.
From a Mac app to a client-server platform
The Plex of 2008 was still a single-machine media center app, not the client-server system people run today. Turning it into that took roughly two years: the first commit toward what became Plex Media Server landed on September 20, 2008, and the first public release of Plex Media Server didn’t ship until August 30, 2010.
In December 2009, while that rebuild was underway, the team incorporated as Plex, Inc., with Ullman as CEO and Feingold as CTO. At that point Plex still looked more like a Boxee-style hobby project than a company: it had around 130 small “apps” for pulling in content from services like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, MTV, and the BBC iPlayer. Keith Valory took over as president and CEO in 2013 and has run the company since, steering it toward the streaming-service pivot that defines Plex today.
Chasing venture capital instead of staying a community project
This is the fork in the road, no pun intended, that separates Plex from projects like Jellyfin, which exists specifically because Emby closed its source code and a group of volunteers refused to let that happen to their own project again. Plex took the opposite path from the start: a company, backed by outside investors, making its own roadmap and pricing decisions.
Plex, Inc. has raised around $130 million across multiple funding rounds. Kleiner Perkins backed both the Series B and Series C rounds, Plex raised $50 million in growth equity in April 2021, and it closed a $40 million Series C extension in January 2024 led by Intercap, with Kleiner Perkins participating again, according to TechCrunch’s reporting on the round. Other investors named across its funding history include Ascolta Ventures and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
That structure is also part of why Plex’s pricing can shift the way it has recently. A company with investors to answer to has different incentives than a volunteer team funded by donations. Our Plex Server Setup guide and the Plex app page both cover exactly what’s changed and what it costs today; this article is about how Plex got here, not what it charges now.
Building the platform: apps, Plex Pass, and a failed cloud experiment
A handful of moments mark Plex’s shift from Mac media player to full platform:
- 2012: Plex Pass launches, an optional subscription that funds ongoing development in exchange for extras like hardware transcoding, mobile sync, and DVR features.
- 2013: Keith Valory becomes president and CEO, a leadership change that lines up with Plex’s shift toward a more commercial strategy.
- 2016: Plex Cloud launches in partnership with Amazon, letting Plex Pass subscribers run a server without their own hardware. Users hit upload limits and performance complaints almost immediately.
- November 2018: Plex Cloud shuts down for good, amid technical problems and copyright concerns.
- December 2019: Plex launches free, ad-supported streaming of licensed movies and TV shows, with content from Warner Bros., MGM, Lionsgate, and Legendary Entertainment among its early partners. This is the moment Plex stops being just a tool for your own media and starts competing for attention with actual streaming services.
- 2022: Plex adds Discover, a feature that pulls together what’s available across a user’s other streaming subscriptions into one interface.
- 2024: Plex launches a movie rental marketplace, passes 1,000 channels in its free ad-supported TV lineup, and partners with T-Mobile to expand its advertising reach.
Where Plex stands today
Plex is headquartered in Campbell, California, and by 2022 it had more people watching its free ad-supported content than people running it as a self-hosted media server. According to Plex’s own numbers reported by TechCrunch, the service had roughly 25 million monthly active users in 2025, up from 16 million in 2023, and that count includes the ad-supported streaming side alongside the self-hosted server crowd it started with.
The self-hosting side hasn’t disappeared, but it’s clearly no longer the whole business. In June 2026, Plex rolled out a fresh round of Discover features: shareable user-curated lists, public discussions attached to titles, and a personalized rating system meant to predict what a given viewer will actually enjoy. It’s a social-network-style push layered on top of a product that started as a way to browse your own movie folder, and it says a lot about which direction the company is actually building toward.
It’s also a useful contrast with how Jellyfin’s origin story played out. Both projects trace back to frustration with a closed-source decision: Plex’s founders wanted a Mac version XBMC wasn’t offering, and Jellyfin’s founders wanted an open Emby that Emby no longer wanted to be. Plex resolved that frustration by building a company and taking outside money. Jellyfin resolved it by refusing to let any company own the outcome again. Neither path is wrong, but they explain a lot about why the two projects feel so different to actually run today, something our Jellyfin vs Plex guide covers in more detail.
FAQ
Who created Plex?
Elan Feingold started the project as a Mac port of XBMC in December 2007. Cayce Ullman and Scott Olechowski joined him in January 2008, and the three of them are generally credited as Plex’s co-founders.
Is Plex a fork of Kodi (XBMC)?
Yes. Plex began as a Mac OS X port of XBMC, the project later renamed Kodi, and formally forked away from XBMC’s codebase on May 21, 2008, before being renamed Plex that July.
Is Plex open source?
No. Unlike its XBMC/Kodi origins, Plex is closed-source, proprietary software owned by Plex, Inc., a venture-backed company. That’s a key difference from Jellyfin, which is fully open source under GPLv2.
Is Plex free?
Yes, for local streaming on your own network; that’s always been free and still is. Plex also runs a separate free, ad-supported streaming service with licensed movies and TV shows. Remote streaming and extra features are where paid tiers come in; see the Plex Server Setup guide for current pricing.
This is the second piece in a short series on where self-hosting’s biggest media servers actually came from. If you haven’t read it yet, the history of Jellyfin covers the 2018 Emby fork that built the open-source alternative to everything described above. For the setup itself, our Plex Server Setup guide and Plex app page cover installing and running it today.