I mean, it tracks metadata and progress centrally. It has clients for various low power appliance type devices as well as web.

If you have more than one TV it's nice to use a cheap android TV device set up to connect to jellyfin on each rather than move your laptop around.

It's also good for a road warrior. I can VPN to my house and steam elsewhere, and it does transcoding on the fly so it works over bad connections too.

And if you want to use VLC or whatever you can still use the web UI to find the media you want and download it.