Plex, a media server program that allows you to organize and stream video and other content from a PC, NAS (network attached storage) device or Nvidia Shield, has announced that it is beefing up its streaming capabilities with some help from Amazon Drive. According to the team behind Plex Inc., the new Plex Cloud service will allow users to access their media from anywhere without having to host it on their own always-on servers.

“Plex Cloud is always on and accessible,” the Plex team said in a blog post. “We take care of all the annoying stuff like software updates and power bills. Our Cloud Elves (that’s totally a thing) have even worked a little bit of magic to bring you all the sweet, sweet transcoding capability usually reserved for more powerful home servers (or as the Cloud Elves call them: ‘closet warmers’).”

The team added, “Let Amazon worry about nasty stuff like power failure, corruption, and data loss. It turns out they’re pretty good at that stuff!”

According to Plex, users will need to sign up for their own Amazon Drive accounts to take advantage of Plex Cloud, but once everything is connected, you will be able to stream all of your cloud media to any device supported by Plex, which includes tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, game consoles and more. Unfortunately, not all Plex services will work with Amazon Drive, at least not at first, and the team explained that some of the missing features in Plex Cloud include Camera Upload, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, Media Optimizer, DLNA and DVR. The company did say, however, that it hopes to add many of these features to Plex Cloud in the near future.

Plex Cloud currently supports Amazon Drive only, but the company noted that it would “valuate adding support for other cloud storage providers over time.” There does not appear to be any discounts for Plex users when signing up for Amazon Drive, but the Plex team said that the service is inexpensive, especially when compared to the hardware costs of setting up a home server.

At the moment, Plex Cloud is still in a limited beta test, so not everyone will get a chance to try it out right away. If you are interested in signing up to participate in the beta, you can do so at www.plex.tv/cloud.

You can also watch a video explaining Plex’s new Amazon Drive support below:

Image courtesy of Plex