Posts Tagged “crunchyroll”

When I heard on Monday that Wednesday’s Anime Almanac post would involve what Scott thought about Crunchyroll, I began thinking about writing a post that both responded to his essay and the two-part interview ICv2 posted with Crunchyroll Ken Gao. But then I got distracted and didn’t read either until Thursday, which happened to be when the post-publication feedback focused on credit and a rehashed discussion of the usefulness/lack thereof of comments.
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Even though the news about Crunchyroll’s deal with TV Tokyo for Naruto Shippuden, Gintama, and three other unnamed series came four hours after Viz’s announcement of their streaming plan, I decided to break it out into its own entry because there are different mechanisms involved in the CR case including more places of distribution, a tiered viewing system, and ditching of what initially grew the site’s popularity.

The terms of the arrangement are that paid monthly Crunchyroll members ($3/month is the going rate) will get access to subtitled streaming episodes of Shippuden an hour after it airs in Japan while non-paying members as well as Joost and Hulu users seeing the same episodes a week later. It is not clear whether those paid CR members will be allowed to download versions of those episodes, high-quality or otherwise. The first episode to be distributed will be the one airing January 8th and should be episode 90. (See the Viz post for projected Japanese airdates.) Since Shippuden currently airs at 19:30-19:57 JST Thursday and will likely keep that timeslot, the quicksub version should appear one hour later at 3am PST/6am EST/1100 UTC that same day.

What may be the more important aspect of this story to Crunchyroll’s future is the “decisive transition” (press release) from user-submitted to professional-provided content. By the same day this new partnership launches, all user-submitted videos will have been removed from the site and many users will likely have leave for other haunts, not caring enough to stick around a place where a significant amount of fansubs of anime and Asian dramas once resided but will no longer after Jan. 8th.

Co-founder Vu Nguyen remarked in his keynote address at Anime Expo this year that the amount of illegal downloads of Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter dropped by a significant amount as they legally premiered online in conjunction with GDH and that they will strive to find a balance between the desires of their audience and advertisers’ requirements while aiming to become an interactive experience built around content, not merely a venue for anime or other videos. An community thrives based on the quality and strength of its users and while the company may feel better about itself for assuming a no tolerance stance on user uploads (by disabling them entirely), their good intentions will, and may have already, leave many of their frequent, yet infringing users with a misplaced feeling of betrayal and abandonment and only time will tell if Crunchyroll will recoup its lost user numbers. High profile series like Naruto Shippuden and Gintama will certainly help them in offsetting an expected dropoff.

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.
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I recently watched the premiere episodes of The Tower of DRUAGA -the aegis of URUK- and BLASSREITER on BOST TV, Crunchyroll, and YouTube to compare the visual quality and the placement of subtitles and also to see if they were shows worth following after the first two episodes. I decided to formulate two separate posts for each series so the next one will be about Blassreiter and will likely have the same technical results. (Links: BOST TV, Crunchyroll, and YouTube.)

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