I believe that’s only if you want to go through their cloud service. You should be able to remote access via port forward like any other service. You will need to set up letsencrypt or deal with self-signed certificates (or buy a certificate) for https to work.
That said, VPN is preferable to broadcasting your media library on the internet, encrypted or not. Just because security hardening probably isn’t Emby and Plex’s highest priority.
I’m still using OpenVPN tunnels, but ZeroTier is intriguing. It looks pretty simple to implement. I’d say follow the documentation and post something here if you hit a wall.
I’m not familiar with Emby, but you definitely don’t need to pay to stream outside your network with Plex.
I do port-forward to Plex, but PMS runs inside a hardened container without the ability to initiate connections to my LAN, so there’s not a heck of a lot an attacker could actually do if he got inside my perimeter there.
Again, Im moving AWAY from Plex/Emby and towards exclusively Kodi and NFS/SFTP. That method works 100% but it takes hardware that some people dont have. They DO have roku’s though. So I have to work with what I can. And again, I would rather SoftEther/ZeroTier it than Reverse Proxy.
