I Was Fine With the ADV-Crunchyroll Deal Until My Eyes Wandered
Posted by: CalAggie in Commentary
As you may have heard, ADV announced on Thursday a deal with CrunchyRoll to stream dubbed episodes of the Gonzo comedy anime Welcome to the NHK! in a promotional partnership. I didn’t have any particular response to the news at first because ADV has traditionally tried to get their dubs as much exposure as possible and because it was an official partnership between the companies, with Best Buy running a short sale ad at the beginning of the first one.
However, while checking out the partnership on CR, I saw High School Girls under the “Others Also Liked…” sidebar and recognized it as the same series that Media Blasters was releasing as Girl’s High. Episode 2’s list of three pseudo-recommendations contained Hand Maid May, a Geneon title that is barely available to buy but is still, I believe, under license by the company. A perusal of CR’s anime index revealed more than twenty other anime available for streaming that are still being sold on region 1 DVD and many of them are Geneon and Media Blasters titles.
The titles I found that ideally shouldn’t be there included others from Media Blasters like Princess Princess and Kujibiki Unbalance; some dormant Geneon licenses in Rozen Maiden, I Me My Strawberry Eggs, and Saiunkoku Monogatari; two Miyazaki films -The Cat Returns and Nausicaa - that Buena Vista distributes; and ironically some ADV titles like Moonlight Mile, Venus Versus Virus, and Yugo the Negotiator. You’d think that ADV would have CHECKED to see if any of their series were being illegally streamed through the website they intended to partner with in this current promotion.
While Crunchyroll claims to adhere to the DMCA, I think they still believe they can operate under the “safe harbor” protection and wait for copyright owners to report. In my opinion, they ceded the ability to operate like that once they got $4 million in venture capital funding in March and should become a more responsible media-serving company. (Fat chance.) In any case, Media Blasters, you should be concerned and contact them about this! Since most of your new titles are subtitled-only, your releases are being more directly affected financially by Crunchyroll hosting these streaming episodes than those of a large-scale, dub-promoting firm like ADV or FUNimation.
While I rarely use the Crunchyroll site itself except for the occasional cross-site comparison, I do like that some series that will very likely never see an American release are on the service and available if they strike my fancy. So if I want to try to watch Uninhabited Planet Survive further than the nine episodes my anime club showed in 2004 before dumping it for Hare Guu Deluxe, I have that ability. I can also rewatch another comedy I first saw in anime club, Tenshi na Konamaiki, that I would actually recommend to fans of Megumi Hayashibara who had never heard of the series. TnK (aka Cheeky Angel) is not a great comedy but it’s still pretty damn funny. Plus the artifacts aren’t too bad on the versions CR is serving up.
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for me to give shinji even the least bit of cred would be for him to clean all that shit out, all those sections that he’s just randomly got there of licensed titles, and just host the unlicensed and partnership anime’s. Its too overly crowded and a lot of double standarding goes on there..is not good.