I want to be informed about Crunchyroll.

Because they don't know or don't wanna deal with sketchy websites, viruses and pop ups, May not be for this medium but for shows in general yeah.

those free YT channels were sort of limited in variety also.

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.

Always funny the same 3 people come out in full force to defend CR's honor lol.

@Zarutaku
They keep 99% of the money, the industry gets hardly anything.
If you wanted to support them, wait for the BDs or buy other merch.

Simple, because I'm a functioning adult member of society and paying for things is considered the social norm. So I pay my dues and watch what I can legally, although I'll freely admit that I still have to sail the seas for about 2/3 of the shows I watch as they're not available to stream legally in the UK (ie from what I'm watching now; One Piece dub, Rose of Versailles, Maison Ikkoku and Kobato).

When I was younger and didn't have a stable income I used to only sail the seas.

Iirc there was an article earlier this year about how for the first time ever the anime industry got more money from international streaming licences, which include CR, than the national broadcasting money and blu ray sales in Japan.

@23feanor There is absolutely no legally available anime in the country where I reside, so does this mean I can sleep well knowing I'm not a dysfunctional member of society who breaks social norms?

On a more serious note, Japanese should make their own streaming platforms for foreigners without American/European middlemen and hire translators who are actually competent. Many people won't pay to companies like Crunchyroll out of principle.

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.