The Problem With Self-Hosted Media
For years, the only way to build a personal media library was to buy dedicated hardware, set up a server at home, configure port forwarding, manage storage drives, and hope your internet upload speed was fast enough to stream outside your house.
Tools like Plex and Jellyfin are incredible pieces of software. But they assume you want to be a sysadmin. You need a machine that runs 24/7, you need to handle transcoding on your own CPU, and when a hard drive fails, your library goes with it.
We kept asking ourselves: why does personal streaming have to be this hard?
The Cloud Changes Everything
Cloud storage has become remarkably affordable. With providers like Cloudflare R2 offering zero egress fees, it is now possible to store and serve media at a fraction of what it used to cost. Transcoding can happen on dedicated infrastructure instead of your living room NAS.
That is the core insight behind Lumen. Instead of running your own server, you upload your media to the cloud. We handle transcoding, metadata matching, subtitle extraction, and delivery to every device you own.
What Lumen Does Differently
- No hardware required — your library lives in the cloud, accessible from anywhere
- Automatic metadata — upload a file and we match it with posters, descriptions, cast info, and trailers from TMDB
- Subtitles included — embedded subtitle tracks are extracted automatically during transcoding
- Multi-device — web, iOS, Apple TV, Android, and Android TV apps
- Multiple profiles — everyone in your household gets their own watchlist and continue-watching history
Built for Real People
We are not building Lumen for power users who enjoy configuring Docker containers. We are building it for people who just want to watch their movies. Upload, match, stream. That is it.
We believe personal media should be as simple as a streaming service — except you own every file in your library.
What is Next
We are currently in closed beta, refining the experience across all platforms. If this resonates with you, join the waitlist and be among the first to try Lumen when we launch.
Your personal cinema is almost ready.