Dream Guest... Elan Feingold and Plex revolutionized home media. In this episode we talk about starting plex, the tech, the plex community, plexamp, and future innovation. Elan was open, funny, brilliant, and went truly deep on Plex. You are in for a treat with this episode!
Timeline/Topic
00:00 - Sponsor - Lightstep
00:43 - Sponsor - Redhat
00:53 - Popcast Opening
01:03 - Intro to Elan Feingold Co-founder and CTO Plex and Plexamp
02:37 - Elan's Journey to Plex
04:54 - Before Plex..
06:40 - Elan's Favorite Movie
09:13 - XBMC and the beginnings of Plex.
12:32 - Plex's community and forum response
15:02 - Is Plex an Open Source company?
17:11 - How does Plex keep up with codecs and other new media streaming tech
20:52 - Plex and Kubernetes?
23:12 - Plexamp
27:12 - Plex's Library functionality
32:13 - Work Elan is most proud of
Episode Links:
Today’s episode sponsor(s) are:
Lightstep. Lightstep’s observability platform is the easiest way for developers and SREs to understand changes in the health of their applications. By automatically analyzing application and infrastructure metrics and connecting dashboards to the underlying changes that matter, Lightstep helps you quickly mitigate outages and triage other issues. Download “The Ultimate Guide to Cardinality for Observability” at https://lightstep.com/popcast to learn more about how having the right data makes all the difference.
Redhat - https://www.redhat.com/ world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. We help you standardize across environments, develop cloud-native applications, and integrate, automate, secure, and manage complex environments with award-winning support, training, and consulting services.
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POP (00:00):
This month's sponsors Lightstep. Lightstep's observability platform is the easiest way for developers and SREs to understand changes and the health of their applications. By automatically analyzing application and infrastructure metrics and connecting dashboards to the underlying changes that matter, Lightstep helps you quickly mitigate outages and triage other issues. Download the ultimate guide to the cardinality for observability at https//lightstep.com/popcast. That's L-I-G-H-T-S-T-E-P.com/ P-O-P-C-A-S-T to learn more about how having the right data makes all the difference. Lightstep, our other sponsor for this month who's sponsoring captions and transcripts are Red Hat. Thank you very much Red Hat.
POP (01:01):
Hello everyone and welcome to the POPCAST. Listen, when I started this show in my heart of hearts, I never thought in my heart of hearts, I would have somebody like that literally, a technology I respect so much. I am one of the first I would say a hundred maybe lifetime subscribers of Plex. I have Popflix. See this, this is Popflix. I built this all with this man. This man's technology helped me learn microservices. So I want to introduce you all to Elan Feingold.
Elan Feingold (01:38):
It's an honor to be here. To be honest, when we started Plex I had no idea that I was going to be on your podcast. So I think it's a mutual honor. I love chatting with people about the technology and about their particular use of Plex. So let's do it.
POP (01:56):
It strikes me as like, look, you're insulated from this and that's because you created it, it's like, "Ah, it's out there, whatever." But you change people's lives with this technology. You realize that.
Elan Feingold (02:07):
Hopefully for the better, I know at least some people get in trouble with their spouses because they have to buy a lot of disc drives now. So it's probably a bit of a pros and cons, but I am still very much... One of the aspects of Plex that I'm passionate about is staying in touch with the community. And I love hearing from people and I love going on to Reddit and seeing people's server builds and it's amazing to see. It's just incredible to see, it's like watching your baby grow up. So it's quite an experience.
POP (02:37):
So let's talk about, listen, you didn't come out of the womb doing media, let's talk about... Maybe you did. I mean, maybe you're an alien that I don't know-
Elan Feingold (02:45):
Not that I know of. I don't actually have memories that go back that early, but let's assume not for the purpose of this interview.
POP (02:51):
So let's talk about your journey the first like before starting Plex all the way to starting Plex.
Elan Feingold (02:57):
Sure. Like I'm sure like many of the things that we do in this life, especially in our spare time is our scratching an itch. We find something that we don't like and as technology people and software builders we generally tinker with stuff that annoys us. So in the case of Plex, it's genesis basically sprung from we were using XBMC back in the day. You probably because you're old school too you know about XBMC and it was right on the cusp of when 720p encodes were available, the higher resolution stuff and X-Box didn't play it well. And the Mac mini came out right about the same time and we're just like, "Wow, that would make an amazing little media box, which could play this high resolution and if only XBMC ran on the Mac mini. "
Elan Feingold (03:55):
So that was sort of the genesis, the itch that we wanted to scratch and where Plex originally came from. And I literally remember the night, 2007 Christmas or something like that, where my wife Anna was gone on a trip and I was bored and being a huge nerd. I was like, "Oh, what do I hack on this weekend?" I'm like, "Let me just download XBMC and try to port it to the Mac mini." If there's any takeaway from that evening it's that and everyone says that, so it's not a deep thought or anything. But small changes can have huge impacts on your life. Small decisions you make, small decisions you make to try out new things or read a new book, or try a new technology can change your life and can change others people's lives also, it's just a reminder of that.
POP (04:54):
But I want to go before this, I want to ask you this, look, XBMC that was the scratch that itch because you wanted to see media. Did you grow up loving movies and music and media in general? Talk to me about that.
Elan Feingold (05:07):
Totally [crosstalk 00:05:08].
POP (05:08):
Nobody goes in their spare time and just says, "Hey, I'm just going to revolutionize how people store personal media in general." Look, I had my wedding, my kids first walk. This is real man. This is not just personal media... This isn't just backing up my media. This is my kids, my wife all of that is here and I use Plex to stream that to my house, that is incredible. So talk to me about the love affair of media.
Elan Feingold (05:39):
I appreciate that question. That's a really solid question and I think, I remember when I was a kid collecting cassettes of music, that was probably my first obsession with music and the first ability to remix and collect and curate media was with the cassette. Because you could go to a friend's house and record different tracks off an LP and stuff like that. So it literally became the original media server was a shoe box full of cassette tapes. So I think it definitely sprung from a love of music that's first and foremost. And I still to this day I think music is collection. I have a guitar here on the corner that you can't see that looks very similar to the guitar here in that corner. So music definitely first love. I don't think I started collecting videos until XBMC timeframe. Always a fan of movies, had a Netflix subscription when they would like still send out discs.
POP (06:39):
Can we double click on it? Let me talk to about that. Do you have a favorite... I'm going to ask you and it's so hard because you probably have a lot of favorites, but give me your favorite movie right now, or favorite movie in general, if it's not The Godfather, but what's your{ favorite movie?
Elan Feingold (06:56):
It would have to be Pulp Fiction. And it's mostly because I've seen it more times than I've seen any other. Maybe I've probably seen Pulp Fiction 15 or 20 times or more. I don't know if people realize how incredibly quotable that movie is. And there was a period of my life when I was working in a cube farm with another guy who would watch it with me, and just all day long we'd find opportunities to inject Pulp Fiction quotes into everything. So I think that's definitely my all time favorite movie. And every watch is great, 25 years later or whatever we are after the release date.
POP (07:32):
Right. Right. And so like, I'm sorry to spider, but let's go back to, again, you're making these mix tapes. Somebody doesn't just make mix tapes and then figure out how to code in C++ or whatever you coded it in, where did we get to that?
Elan Feingold (07:50):
I have had a love of computers since I was literally probably 10. And this was back to date myself this is like early '80s when programming meant just barely Apple II, Sinclair ZX Spectrum was a thing, so I grew up in Europe so I liked more access to that, so the computers were kind of just starting to get into the home. Ever since I was 10 writing programs on I think an Apple II, I was like, "This is awesome. I want to do this. This is really fun." And I had one little diversion into electrical engineering. When I first went to college, I was like, "No, I want to do electrical engineering."
Elan Feingold (08:35):
And then I realized that the difference between electrical engineering and software engineering is with electrical engineering you have to buy all these pieces and you can burn yourself with a soldering iron, and it's pretty toxic what you're breathing. But given a compiler, you can literally build whatever you can dream. You don't need anything else. You need a keyboard, you need a compiler, you need your screen and your imagination is the one that... And I think that's honestly what got me hooked at it from a young age, never had a lot of money growing up, but you just had a computer and a keyboard you could expand your universe.
POP (09:11):
It's incredible. And so again, we make our mixed tapes, we learn to compile, we do what we got to do. Then we get to the XBMC days and we're like, "Okay, my wife's away. I'm going to figure out how to port this over to Mac mini." How does that end up being Plex? How do we get to that?
Elan Feingold (09:30):
Great question. So I'm hacking away, hacked away for a few days, got something very stupid working the tiny little bit and posted it to the forum, the XBMC forums and was like, "Hey guys. Look, it's running on a Mac mini almost." I think I had a couple of technical questions and was like, "Hey, anyone else interested?" At that point, who would become my co-founders reached out to me from the Bay area and were like super randomly were just like, "Hey, we saw you did this and we were actually interested in exact same thing, and hey maybe there's a business here. And hey, why don't we meet and chat about this?" It was almost like a prank call at this point.
Elan Feingold (10:23):
I think I was home for Christmas in Minnesota with my wife and I was like on the phone and I'm like, "Sounds a little bit too good to be true. Do I want to own a business, but I'm not even sure what the businesses is, it's like open source but, 'Okay. Why not?'" But then the genesis of the whole business side of things, XBMC was obviously open source. And it also had what we considered to be a fatal architectural flaw, which is that it was a monolithic program. You installed it on a computer, it scanned your media and your media was there. And if you happened to have two televisions or God forbid you were somewhere out of your home and wanted to access your media it was awesome for the entertainment room, but we just thought this deserved a client sever model. We wanted centralized server and remember this is before... No, sorry. The iPhone had just gotten launched that summer, summer 2007, but there weren't apps for it yet and Android didn't obviously exist.
Elan Feingold (11:28):
So there's literally no mobile market yet, but even just inside of the home we wanted to be in a place where God forbid, if you have two television one would remember where the other one left off. And you only needed one central repository to curate and make beautiful. So that was our first step into intellectual property, essentially. Our first piece of Plex IP was this media server. So that's essentially where the business aspect started. And then the Plex Pass, which you very kindly were one of our first supporters became the, "Okay, how do we actually make money off of this kind of a thing? How do we turn this into a real business where we can quit our day jobs? Because all of us had day jobs at that point."
POP (12:15):
And again, I'm going to tell you I suffered through the first iterations of PMS, the Plex Media Server. And basically like the... And this is what I love about you, about your company and the project, every iteration gets better and better. The way that you all were scanning was very intensive. And then you built it, you basically built this thing that says, "Can I throttle it? Do you want it to be as hardcore as possible or swinging it back?" And then you started adding more switches and those types of things. So cognizant, I wish a lot of products do what you all do or projects, where you just listen to the customer and you build in those iterations.
POP (12:58):
Because there was stuff on the forum, "This is killing my box. What you all doing?" Next iteration, look, it wasn't instantaneous but a couple of versions later, it was fixed. Talk to me about that, how do you solicit that great feedback? Is it built in the DNA, anybody you're hiring you say, "You need to be customer facing." Because you all are so amazing interacting with that community. It's amazing.
Elan Feingold (13:21):
I think you're being very kind and I think you could definitely find people saying the opposite thing, and you could definitely find instances of cases where we haven't been as responsive as we wanted to be. But I think that it has been in our DNA from the get go to have a close relationship with our community and our users. Speaking personally, interacting with longtime users is a huge pleasure. And it's always something that I've loved. Go look at my posts in the forum. I still post a lot on the forum. What am I doing 10 years into this company still arguing about shit on the forum with users or going onto Reddit, God forbid. So I think so I think to an extent it is built into the DNA that we listen to our users.
Elan Feingold (14:13):
But that also becomes just from a practical standpoint, as you get many more users and many more features, it becomes a lot harder and you have to weigh priorities. And back in the when you only had a few dozen users and some user would be like, "Hey, this isn't working." You'd be like, "Sweet, hold on. Let me get you a update. Does it work now?" And you'd have this real tight interaction loop. And now sometimes it takes months to plan and iterate on and stuff like that. And it's something believe it or not we're always trying to do better. And we definitely do have cases where we've let stupid bugs linger for way too long and not prioritize them. And so we're cognizant of it, we're self-aware of it, we try to improve over time because that is our focus. We want to make people happy with the product. We want to make an awesome product.
POP (15:06):
Again, as a project you have a lot of people contributing. Would you say that Plex is... To me again, I think it's open core, but it has the obviously commercial aspects of it be it with that honestly people need to pay for. Because you all put your blood, sweat and tears in it. This is great functionality that people need to pay for. I'm not doing a infomercial, I'm not getting shit from Plex. I'm just letting you know this is just the reality of it, there's amazing pieces of functionality. Do you consider yourselves an open source company?
Elan Feingold (15:38):
I don't think open source company would be a fair characterization, but what I try to... I personally, again, think of Plex as being a platform and platforms as such have ingress and egress points and APIs and stuff like that. There are definitely portions of Plex that are open source and you can modify, and there are certain clients like the Kodi add-on that we did, that's totally open source. But I think what we've tried to do is make it open for people to hook in as many ways as possible. Historically, we've had scanners that you can plug into scan whatever type of weird media you have, and agents that you could plug in to bring in metadata from various sources. We've in recent years added web hooks so that you could use it to dim your lights when the movie comes on and stuff like that.
Elan Feingold (16:33):
I think of it as more of a platform with hooks that we want people to be building stuff on top of and integrating with, something like media just has so much potential for integration especially at the home level but also just in other ways. And it always we see people doing unique stuff with it and it's kind of cool. A lot of early hires in fact came from people who were like, "Hey, I figured out how to use your API and I built this." And we're like, "Holy shit, that's awesome. Why don't you come work for us?" So that's always cool to see too.
POP (17:12):
We're going to get deep tech here. Again, I've been a fan for years, but one of the questions I have for you compression technologies, FFmpeg and all of those things. They've been through so many iterations. You've seen them all and you've had the plan for all of these things. How do you keep up with that? How do you QA these things? Because I'm looking at it from the early days and into now, with MKV and the container technology and all that are built in there. How did you all keep up with that? The way that you transcode this stuff has gotten better and better with every iteration of the backend Plex Media Server. How do you keep up with that?
Elan Feingold (17:53):
To be honest, it's tough, it's a rapidly changing... And definitely there are new codecs coming online, VP9, HEVC, all that kind of stuff. And then that's multiplied by or compounded by the fact that we try to be on all these different platforms from smart TVs and phones and all these different devices. And they are always evolving too and not always in lockstep with each other. But to be honest that is one aspect where we rely very heavily on that amazing piece of open-source software, FFmpeg. We definitely use it in certain ways, I think there's a lot of companies out there that use it in a lot of different ways. I think it's fair to say it's the unsung hero of the media universe of tech right now. If you go find a company that's doing something with video encoding or decoding or something, if they're smart they're probably using FFmpeg. We rely very heavily on that and we also have some-
POP (19:01):
And you contribute back to it Elan? I'm just curious.
Elan Feingold (19:03):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. We push changes upstream and clearly since it's open source, if we make changes to it with all our releases, we make the source available. And we have a really some stellar people working on that aspect of the code inside the media server, so we're very fortunate there too.
POP (19:27):
One of the stuff that I think early on and again, I'm kind of giving my laundry list but got you on man [crosstalk 00:19:33].
Elan Feingold (19:33):
Go for it.
POP (19:34):
Early on, I had a lot of issues with Dolby and five to one in terms of the audio aspect of it. And again, I don't know what happened there was one iteration it just all went away. So how do you keep up with the other thing it's not so much the video because it's great. It's how do you keep up with like all of the different audio codecs that are out there as well? Are you dependent on FFMpeg, what are the things to keep up with that?
Elan Feingold (20:02):
There's a combination of factors. There definitely FFMpeg updates, there's hardware, the OSs have different support for different codecs built in. So if you're on Windows versus Mac OS it's going to be different. And that plays out way more in fact with hardware accelerated transcoding, which is a huge can of worms but there's a lot of moving pieces here. And I think if there's one goal statement around a media server is we want to make what's incredibly complicated work seamlessly, and we don't always succeed at that. But sometimes it does feel like magic even for me where I know all the pieces between A and B, when you just hit play on your iPhone a thousand miles away and it just works. And you're like, "Wow, that's kind of cool."
POP (20:51):
Nice. One of the things too, I got some questions from the Twitter-verse and they were like, "Oh, you're going to have a Elan on, ask him about are they ever going to figure out how to have GPU level encoding for Kubernetes, so transcoding on multiple boxes." What's the thought on that? See I told you were going deep geek. Going deep geek right now.
Elan Feingold (21:13):
No, that's fine. We had for a while a cloud version of the media server. And in that world, we actually did have an encode for it, it wasn't built using Kubernetes it probably should have been. So we had something that was a lot like a transcode cluster that was behind that and powering that. We've definitely talked about it over the years. There's some interesting pieces of tech that have come along. I think the Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 one of them started offering hardware, accelerated transcoding of certain codecs and we thought, "Oh, that'd be kind of cool if you just had bought a $30 Raspberry Pi and plugged into your network, installed a little Plex worker on it and then all of a sudden it just joined your Plex worker farm."
Elan Feingold (22:02):
It's one of these things that it's... At the same time computers have also gotten way, way, way more powerful and GPU's have gotten way, way, way more powerful. And the ability to use them for encoding has gone up. So with a fairly cheap, well chosen PC, you can stream 10, 15 streams simultaneously. So I think it was a couple of factors, one, clearly distributed clusters of transcoders is hard, especially in a home. And two the power of PCs just kept on getting better and better and better also. But I think there is at least one fully open source project that is super clever. I can't remember the name, but they brought in some reverse proxy and cluster allow it, I saw it some time ago and was like, "Wow, that's pretty damn cool." But I forgot what it's called.
POP (23:03):
So anybody on that upstream project, go ahead and keep forking it and keep on working on it. All right. Just make sure because that's a good one. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about Plexamp now. And again, we're going back to the love of music and I love it. And again, I have all my stuff lossless. Plexamp is cool for many reasons. It's a beautiful UI, it's beautiful usage but you brought back visualizations. That's the one thing, that's the killer app right there. Talk to me about that, you were in the room and you were like, "You know what, fuck it. We're going back. We're going to bring visualizations back in a big way." So talk to me about that.
Elan Feingold (23:44):
I was an old school Winamp user, I fucking loved visualizers GEISS, iTunes, full screen and all that stuff. It's one of those things that I just don't think any serious music geek, who listened to music on a computer can do without. It's one of the coolest things. We hope to actually do more on that front because we support a few visualizers, some of them were kind of cool. But I'd love to bring a lot more visualizers in and maybe even make it a plugin kind of a thing where you can install your own. But we love music visualizers and I think anyone who's a music geek is going to agree with us on that.
POP (24:27):
What I love about it again, when I'm streaming, again, I'm a Telemetry guy-
Elan Feingold (24:32):
What's your favorite visualizer?
POP (24:33):
I love all of them dude. Honestly, every day I just sort through them. I'm just going to pick one in a different one. When I'm looking through it, what I love about it too and I was looking at the metrics of it. If I look at my boxes that are encoding or that are transcoding and sending out, hey, you're using nothing. It's incredible, how did you all do that? Was that, again, "We want to use very low utilization here and stream this out to somebody." What was the impetus of that? I want to know the goals of Plexamp. What are the three goals you wanted to do with Plexamp?
Elan Feingold (25:10):
First and foremost, the goal behind Plexamp was... I think I wrote this up more eloquently in a Medium post somewhere, but basically it was like, play your music and keep playing it. It was that simple. As soon as you hit play, you want to be hearing something as soon as possible and you want to keep hearing meaning if you drive through a tunnel or into bad connectivity, which thankfully I had. I was like the perfect test case, if you drive out of my place, you drop wifi, you get shitty cell, then you get no cell, then you get cell. So I'm like a perfect use case and for years using our original app, which is just based on the default Apple audio streaming stuff, I could never listen to a song from start to finish leaving my house.
Elan Feingold (25:59):
So again it's like that itch scratching. So that was the first and foremost goal of Plexamp was play music, keep playing music. And you can see that in a lot of ways, one way is we direct play a lot of music, which is what you're alluding to. So as many codes as possible FLAC, MP3, AAC, ALAC a few others that I'm forgetting right here. And then if we have to transcode, we transcode to OPUS which is the gold standard, as I'm sure you're well aware of for music transcodes, supposedly transparent at 128. Some people even claim it's transparent as well at 96 kilobits per second, which is just fucking magic. So that was the other impetus also just in terms of caching, we do a lot of pre-caching on Plexamp. So for the scenario where you're in your car in your garage with wifi, will just load up five, six, seven, eight tracks, will grab along FLAC so that when you lose wifi, you still have them there. So we wanted to minimize the amount of cellular coverage you have, so those are some of the goals around it.
POP (27:08):
Again, it's fantastic.
Elan Feingold (27:09):
Thank you.
POP (27:09):
I want to talk to actually two more questions and this is about Plex library. Again, I've been waiting years to interview you, man, don't even worry about it. I didn't even have a show and I was like, "I'm going to interview this guy someday." So I want to ask you I love the library function. That is the unsung hero of Plex, the ability for you to, again, I point it to a directory, I can put this in and I have all of my... Let's just say again, I have my wedding. In my wedding, I have the invitation on it and you I have it tied to that directory and all that, that is incredible. It is the best media management out there. I don't care. I think there was a lot of XBMC stuff originally, whatever, but you all have just... The whole idea of agents and all of that. Talk to me about that. It's amazing. What's the special sauce there? What as the mission for this, for the library management?
Elan Feingold (28:08):
Yeah. I think the mission was, was essentially to allow people to make their... A few things. One was to be able to let them make an incredibly visually appealing collection of their stuff, they clearly value this media if they're collecting it. You clearly value your wedding videos. Why not let you arrange it in as beautiful a way as possible. So there's definitely that aesthetic component, there's sort of the structural component too with the metadata. We want to have rich metadata for all of these things so that we can organize them. You can sort them by genres and years and make smart playlists and do all kinds of interesting-
POP (28:51):
Even resolutions-
Elan Feingold (28:51):
... with it.
POP (28:52):
... that's the coolest thing in the world. If I have two resolutions to something, it tells me which one do you want to play? Even if it's not in any type of centralized directory... Because you all understand nobody's keeping all their shit in a like centralized directory. That's the part that I'm just like, "It's genius." Because you're thinking about that user who literally has all their shit all over the place. I keep mine in a fairly Plex music, movies, TV whatever. We standardize and this is what we do. God, you crack the code on that. That's incredible, man. I'm sorry.
Elan Feingold (29:32):
No. And you'll probably find it amusing how many people still are incredibly adamant that one of the most important features of Plex is the folder mode. I don't know if you realize this, you probably don't because you just embrace the library and live with it. But there's a subset of people who think that folder mode is the way to go. I don't know but you claim to have a semi clean directory structure, if you saw my directory structure your head would explode. Everything's in a few top level directory, nothing's really named right. Yes, I have a folder problem but the names are all over the place and I've got them spread out all over the place.
Elan Feingold (30:12):
And that to me is the magic of Plex, to your point it takes all that, you don't really need to care about it. You can then make it beautiful, but it's funny to me how there's definitely a little bit of letting go there. You have to be like, "I don't really care what it looks like on file. I'm not going to be that OCD." You definitely see people that are incredibly OCD, who have three levels of directory for their movies and for whatever reason they want to see that structure.
POP (30:36):
But it also you'd be able to jobs that clean it up too, all inherit there. And again, I was from the world that started without all that stuff and it got better and better and better for me to control my library. This goes with listening to... Look, you're not going to nail it with every single feature I get it. But that is like a 99 percentile type of amazing thing. So big fan boy on that fantastic work.
Elan Feingold (31:01):
Thanks.
POP (31:02):
So I got another question for you and this is one that so basically you saw that Apple just came out with the... We were talking about the Mac mini. The start of your journey here. They came out with an M1 chip. Are you looking to support that eventually or will you?
Elan Feingold (31:18):
Yeah, definitely. Supporting Apple Silicon is definitely on our roadmap. We would love to get the media server built for it. Media server unfortunately as you can imagine is a very large and complex piece of software with a ton of dependencies. And a lot of times for a lot of these open source dependencies we rely on them supporting it before we can support it. There's a lot of work in order to move to a new platform. But in general, a lot of us at Plex are huge Apple fans. And everyone that I've talked to about it has been pretty blown away by the new hardware.
Elan Feingold (31:52):
I have a MacBook Air. Right now, I have a Mac book that's four years old that can barely do a Google Meet without stuttering all over the place and it's terrible. So I'm so looking forward to MacBook Air, but by all accounts they've really blown it out of the park with the M1 so I can't wait to play with it.
POP (32:10):
Nice. My last question for you Elan is what work are you most proud of?
Elan Feingold (32:19):
Can you be a little bit more specific, inside Plex in the kitchen? Like I've cooked some pretty good roasts.
POP (32:24):
It could be anything, it could be a roast. What are you most proud of work-wise?
Elan Feingold (32:33):
I think the original... I definitely have a lot of nostalgia for the first release, I think it called Plex/Nine that we made way back when, which is kind of a first split between the media server and XBMC. And we just had this like amazingly cool ragtag group of people working on this, again, largely in their spare time because we didn't really have a company yet. And I love that sort of merry band of engineers, so that I'm definitely super proud of that. But more recently it's hard to pick something. Definitely, I think to your point a lot of things feel very incremental at this point because we've got an established progress, so it's not like we're... We've had a lot of pretty big launches involving a lot of different pieces of technology and tons of people doing amazing work.
Elan Feingold (33:31):
You're asking me, me personally and clearly at this point the company is so big, and we're working on so many things at once that it's hard to be directly involved with a lot of it, so it's hard to pick something from there. But there's been so many moments over the last 10 years, I've been proud not only of what we've made and delivered to people, but just I've definitely made lifetime friends here at Plex. And so the group of people that we have working with us now, which is now in the 90 to a 100 range in terms of employees distributed worldwide. It's just I've never worked with a better group of people, both technically and just they're amazing humans so that really feels good.
POP (34:19):
Well, having you on the show made me feel good, man. I just want to let you know. Again, you've changed my life, I want to let you know that, your technology has. I can't put it into words. Again, it's an honor to speak to you, what you do matters to a lot of people. It's incredible technology and you made a small thing a very big thing. And so I appreciate you, man, and thank you so much for being on my show.
Elan Feingold (34:49):
Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.