Plex started off as an easy way to stream your video collection to your other devices, but the service has expanded significantly over the past few years. However, not all that functionality ends up being popular, and now Plex is ditching support for podcasts and web shows.

Plex said in a forum post, "as part of our ongoing effort to make sure we’re spending our time and energy in ways that best serve our awesome user community, we’ve made the decision to end support for Podcasts and Web Shows within Plex. We recognize this decision will impact several of you greatly, and we apologize for the inconvenience it will cause. You can continue to access these features within Plex until Friday, April 15th, 2022, at which point they will no longer be available."

Plex first added support for podcasts in 2018, which didn't require a dedicated server like most of the service's other features — audio files were downloaded from the source to your device, like any other podcast player. However, the functionality didn't change much after that point, and many bugs seemingly were never fixed. Multiple threads on the Plex forums pointed out 'On Deck' often didn't work, listening to a podcast episode added all of its episodes to the play queue, some platforms didn't have a functioning indicator for listened episodes, and other issues.

Web shows were also added to Plex in 2018, which contained curated content from publishers like Engadget, GQ, TechCrunch, Popular Science, and Ars Technica. It was mostly just video content that was already accessible through YouTube.

Plex says you'll be able to export your list of podcast subscriptions in standard OPML format, which can then be imported by most other podcast applications. The full instructions are available at the source link below.

Source: Plex Forums