I want to be informed about Crunchyroll.

I started paying for streaming because the pirate scene stopped providing anything better than legal options for ongoing/seasonal anime. After fansubs died out in the early 2010s, and fan-edits of official subs largely died out in the mid-10s, pirated anime was just "the same thing as legal anime, except FOR FREE." And streaming legally saves me the hassle of downloading increasingly-bloated files and storing them on increasingly-shaky external hard drives -- I don't care to patronize bootleg streaming sites that profit from the work of the anime industry and the fansubbing/ripping scene.


Anime piracy (in well-served areas like the US) maybe used to be a service problem, when the pirated versions had subjectively-better downloaded fansubs (roughly) during the JP broadcasts, and the legal versions were physical-media-only and came out years afterward. But now, pirates generally consume the same shows, with the same subtitles, and with the same or worse video quality than the legal versions. Aside from regional unavailability, the biggest difference is "free vs. not free" -- a pricing problem.


What about anime-originals that have no manga, like this show that you rated a 9? Buying manga also throws money into a "bucket" shared by rights-holders and publishers before it gets to the manga author, let alone anyone involved with the anime.


How does subscribing to one or more streaming services limit you to watching what's "streamable"?

You speak of your love for "boomer anime," presumably including this Winter 2003 series that you rated fairly well and is also a pet favorite of mine. Back in 2006, I spent the equivalent of ~$110 in today's money to buy it on DVD, and that amount would easily pay for a year's streaming subscription. So based on the hard, truthful numbers, I have a hard time seeing the current landscape as unaffordable.


What if I told you that there are streaming sites out there that profit from CR's translations and dubs, and don't pay anything at all to the translators or VAs? Surely you'd be even more against them, right?

It was Sony that bought Funi, then CR, then Rightstuf, then folded it all into the CR name. And it was anime viewers that wanted a monopoly, because they adamantly refused to pay for multiple subscriptions to support a multipolar anime streaming ecosystem -- they wanted as much as possible in one place, for as low a price as possible. Same with union dubs: if anime viewers truly valued them, they should've spent enough on the shows they pirated and enjoyed to keep companies like Geneon, Bandai, Rightstuf/Nozomi, and Media-Blasters alive and/or healthy enough to afford to make dubs outside of Texas.

So why would the anime industry upend their workflow for licensing/streaming deals they don't care about? It certainly seems like IG / Wit's George Wada cares about them.

If there were a fansubbing scene ready to take over if these companies shut down or stop licensing anime, why don't we currently get good and timely translations for things like OVAs and specials that don't get legally streamed? For example, I recently watched this episode, which was not subbed in English until 6 years after it came out, and the subs were Google Translations of Russian subs with minor cleanup -- coherent enough to understand what was going on, but not good by any means.


If you want to nurse culture-war grievances from 6 years ago, that's your business. But if I'm reading this right, is CR actually a legal pirate site that operates in the open and bamboozles Japan into letting them stream their shows for free and keep all the profits for themselves, but still maintains a lesser selection than other pirate sites just to keep up an elaborate ruse? You'd think after a decade and a half, Japanese companies (none of which took any legal action against CR over HGS!) would've realized they were being conned.

Comfort. Sure I can watch a Netflix series for free on the internet, but is more comfortable to watch it on Netflix. First of all, most of us have Smart TVs those days, and while you can access illegal streaming services on it, it's quite a pain in the ass to deal with all the ads and pop-ups. In the rare occasion when a movie is not available on any of the services I use, I look for it on the Internet. Is a pain, just getting over the ads and having the movie start takes minutes, and then you can't rewind or even pause because every press of the button may start a new series of pop-ups and ads. And when you watch a movie with the family, the last thing you want is an ad to Chaturbate or Pornhub. Netflix and Crunchyroll have inbuilt apps on my TV, and is easy and fast to access. Even on PC, most of those illegal sites are full of malware and are straight-up designed for phishing. Many of their ads even bypass adblockers.
There is also quality. Netflix has 4K and more, which looks great on my 4k TV. Where online, you find at best upscaled 720p, and maybe 1080p if you are lucky.

So in general, comfort and accessibility is the main reason. As long as a streaming service is more accessible and comfortable than pirating, people will pay for it. Unfortunately, those services are starting to forget that, looking at how they keep pushing prices up, and even wanting to add ads, just to have another good quarter for their shareholders.


And there is of course wanting to support what you love. The industry needs money to survive. Is also nice to won things, at least when it comes to manga.




Dude is been like 6-7 years since this crap, get over it. Crunchyroll produced plenty of anime other than this, they basically kickstarted Korean webtoons being adapted. And no, the money don't just go to Crunchyroll. Do you think that the anime they host on that platform is a free donation from Japan? They buy licenses for it, and pay licenses for it to stay. And those licenses aren't that cheap. Apparently, streaming services pay around $250k per episode for licenses, along with royalties. Some anime from more popular franchises can cost even 400k per episode. Why do you think we are getting so much anime of 24 episodes and more those days? Is because just streaming services licenses have become enough to cover production costs and even give a profit. This bullcrap with the anime industry not getting money from Crunchyroll or is just a nonsensical myth from those who don't understand how this business works.




That's nonsense. You have no clue what you are talking about. They don't keep anything, because they don't have to give anything. Crunchyroll and streaming services don't work on a 'share revenue' business model. They buy the licenses of the anime they host. So by the time an anime is on the platform, it was already paid for. And they have more royalties to pay every year to keep it. The industry is not getting hardly anything, they get between 250k and 400k dollars per episode. Which is nearly double of the production costs for most anime.

Oh snap! That's a lot more ka-ching ka-ching than I thought. Sounds like the Crunchy king is actually contributing a whole bunch'a moolah to the industry. Fingers crossed some of that money finds it's way into the animators pockets.

Animators generally work as freelancers and get paid a fixed amount per frame they finish. An anime could be an international phenomenon, the animators would still get paid basically nothing. Which is why supporting the industry =/= supporting the animators who animated the show.

Because people think they support the industry by paying for Crunchyroll and Netflix. Which they don't. Japan doesn't need Crunchyroll or Netflix, not necessarily. Neither do anime watchers. Crunchyroll and Netflix only exist to give pozzed translations and prevent accurate fansubs. If these companies die, we will only get better translations.

Generally speaking you throw out some good points but Anime is an industry. Without it there would be no Anime being produced. Animators would simply just be out of a job completely if everyone simply stopped supporting the industry just to give a big middle finger to the corporations and committees involved in every production project. No one would invest in any future animated project ever again and I doubt fans would be so generous to simply throw large amounts of money individually blindly at a bunch of unknown Japanese animators without any specific goals or projects.

As much as Fans likely pretend to give a shit about the animators behind the scene, their interest really only go as far as what is actually being produced in their own interest and even then most fans likely have no clue who these people really are or care about them individually. If a fan doesn't like a franchise a bunch of unknown artists are working on, I doubt that fan would simply buy an Anime they don't like just to support those artists even if they did get a significant amount of pay for working on it. You only hear about praise in this medium about the Authors whose work gets adopted into an Anime even if they don't put a considerable amount of work in the adaptations or any work at all into them and it's never about any specific unknown Animators or artists.

When fans go to a music concert to see some pop artist perform on a big stage, they don't really give a shit about the band they hired to play the music behind them when they contribute to over 95% of the actual music being performed or even really think about them. They basically get paid pennies for their work compared to what the pop idol makes as well as anyone one else such as the cooperation to the ticket distributors. The only reason such a music artist even gets to perform on such a big stage is because of the existence of such an industry to elevate them to such a degree.

I pay for Crunchyroll and Hidive and have access to Netflix. Why? Because I really enjoy watching anime, and if it's something I love I want to see it in the highest quality. Aside from buying a bluray which is prohibitively expensive, paid streaming services offer the highest quality version of the anime, more than a pirate site or torrent can. No compression artifacts, no low resolutions, no outages or site takedowns. I will pirate something if it's just not available legally, or the legal site happens to have a bad quality version of it (Crunchy's Kanon 2006 is horrendous)

@ColourWheel

Again, when you buy an anime bluray, the money you spent doesn't go to the animators. I'm not saying that they get a few cents from the bluray sale. They get nothing, zip, nada. Instead, the money goes to the companies who own the copyrights. Supporting the anime industry only helps animators in the sense that it motivates companies to continue producing more anime and retain freelancers who gets paid a fixed amount per finished frame. This is why I said that supporting the industry is not the same as supporting animators. People often throw these two together when they're not the same thing.

I concede that if companies started paying animators a reasonable wage, that wouldn't necessarily make people already used to pirating anime become more willing to buy blurays to show support for the animators. This of course, will depend on their own financial condition as well as their entitlement levels. I say that the original creators deserve all the attention and recognition that they get. Animators and translators should be given due credit and a pay conmensurate to their contribution to the final product.

as for the final argument...wtf? i mean i can't speak for everyone, but i certainly value everyone in the band, not just the lead singer. that's just stupid.

Crunchyroll licensing out their own content isn't an issue. It's relatively normal for corporations to license out certain projects of their to other services, as you can still find for example some Warner Bros content on Netflix and Peacock despite WB owning the Max (formerly called HBO Max) streaming service. You can't really shit on another service for accepting a licensing deal with Crunchyroll to stream some of CR's content, although you probably can and rightfully should still call out Crunchyroll for not paying their translators and actors, and something as simple as adding in residuals into the contracts can help when these shows get licensed out to other platforms. If there is an issue, you shouldn't blame the ones buying the product rather than the company producing it, and in a case like that, another company streaming a few Crunchyroll shows shouldn't be to blame for Crunchyroll's horrible business practices.



Viewers opinions on the Crunchyroll monopoly have shifted over time as CR has abandoned many features due to this new monopoly. One of the first big examples of this would be the removal of the ad supported viewing option for new releases 1 week after Premium members, which slowly over time also led to some shows that were previously available free with ads such as the official Yu-Gi-Oh subtitles being locked behind a Premium subscription now.

There was another controversy when Rightstuf was acquired as it put quite a wrench into their model. Rightstuf had previously picked up NSFW content as well as a few shows FUNimation had dropped such as Interspecies Reviewers, only to get acquired by the merged company that had abandoned said shows in the first place and would probably not want to continue the official licensing of pornographic animation. All NSFW content was pulled off of the Rightstuf Anime website and put onto some random no name site that popped up to basically just be a NSFW only store where Crunchyroll just pushes all the stuff they don't want to be associated with to. There was also the issue of the store, since Rightstuf was well known among DVD and Blu Ray collectors such as me for their high-quality packaging which was meticulously done to ensure your products arrived undamaged and in as high quality as possible. Meanwhile Crunchyroll's store is NOTORIOUS among collectors for their poor packaging as they basically just throw your DVDs in the box with very little protection, commonly leading to products arriving damaged. Once the stores merged, many buyers were upset to see that Crunchyroll's packing practices were applied over Rightstuf's leading to pre-orders people had made from Rightstuf that were fulfilled by Crunchyroll arriving damaged. Crunchyroll store is pretty horrible with its packing and its prices as well, which is another issue since now since there's little competition among anime stores, they can charge a higher price instead of trying to be competitive whatsoever.

Most people don't even know about the difference between Union and non-union dubs, that's really only something hardcore fans know about. You can't really expect the average person who knows very little about dub production to support companies who are also less well known (with maybe the exception of Bandai) just because they are union projects.

@GrumbleD You're right. Crunchyroll offers very high quality streaming service.
cough https://medium.com/@Daiz/crunchyrolls-reduced-video-quality-is-deliberate-cost-cutting-at-the-expense-of-paying-customers-c86c6899033b
cough https://www.polygon.com/2017/3/15/14926414/crunchyroll-video-quality-drop cough cough


edit: wait, who put up those random links on my post?
(though in fairness this was, what, 7 years ago)

@DreamingBeats
I can't speak to the quality of Crunchyroll in 2017, but if I saw a severe dropoff in quality today I wouldn't want to pay for it either. I have no issue with the current stream quality except for some of their older pre 2010s shows that aren't available in HD even though HD versions exist.

CR won’t be getting another cent out of me for this alone. Have you used any alternatives since? I’ve heard good things about Robert’s Anime Corner Store.

I don't use Crunchyroll, but if we're talking about Netflix... you're aware that the service offers many, many more titles and genres than just anime, right? Anime is far from being their main product. Heck, I would daresay that anime doesn't even compose 5% of Netflix's entire library.

I seriously doubt that most people who signed up for a Netflix subscription did so just to watch the anime on there. They most likely just happen to watch those anime, along with all the other live-action movies/TV series they typically watch because they're already subscribed and it's accessible, so why not?

At least, that's how it is in my case. Every other anime I wanna watch that isn't on Netflix, I have no problem with sailing the high seas for them.