[kevstev]

I kind of hear you on this- its not super necessary, but it can be convenient. I use Synology VideoStation which is a part of their NAS Suite. We keep a small library of often rewatched stuff- holiday movies, a few of the wifes favorites, etc... and the nice thing is I can play it on any TV in my house from an app on my phone. I can also stream to say my local laptop when I am away if I wanted to as well, though I think I have done that exactly once.

What is a little nicer about it is that we can hear about something, have it downloaded to the folder that gets indexed, and have it available to play near instantaneously. My NAS also does transcoding if necessary, so that eliminates a lot of hassles around codecs and such as well.

A lot of people take this a step further and avoid all paid services and just use tools like radarr and sonarr to get whatever content they are interested automatically off the high seas and play it when they want to.

The network share is the hard part- well really having the always on server that hosts it- plex/jellyfin/emby etc are just a little bit of sugar on top that make it a nicer experience. And IME, you install once and you are done, there is no maintenance to deal with afterwards so there is little downside.