Forum - View topic

Why Don't Streaming Sites Work Together?

A partnership requires two companies to agree on the same terms. So how would that be power abuse?

Well then when will Amazon will start releasing the anime they licensed themselves on blu-ray or DVD or Give it to sentai or Funimation to release it then?

Zalis116 wrote:

And this objection seems to be unique to the anime viewerbase. Steam doesn't have every video game, and Netflix/Hulu don't have every US movie and TV show, yet you don't see the same kind of "Unless one service has EVERYTHING, I'm going to keep on pirating" mentality in gamers and fans of Western entertainment.

Not entirely true; there are lots of people who are annoyed at how many services you need to subscribe to in order to watch the top live action shows. If you want to watch Star Trek Discovery, you have to have a specific subscription; there are some shows that are only simulcast on Hulu, some that are only available through HBO Go, etc. If anything, this is a problem that is only recently starting to affect anime. Remember; in recent years, Game of Thrones seasons and episodes have been the most pirated.

I never encountered any of that, but not every cable system's Video On Demand is the same.

leelee85 wrote:

Well then when will Amazon will start releasing the anime they licensed themselves on blu-ray or DVD or Give it to sentai or Funimation to release it then?

We don’t know. We don’t even know which titles, if any, that Amazon has more than just streaming rights to. It’s just as likely that Sentai, Funimation, or someone else could license those rights from the Japanese companies, rather than having to go through Amazon. Until something is announced, or one of the titles officially solicited, we don’t know.

dragonrider_cody wrote:

leelee85 wrote: Well then when will Amazon will start releasing the anime they licensed themselves on blu-ray or DVD or Give it to sentai or Funimation to release it then? We don’t know. We don’t even know which titles, if any, that Amazon has more than just streaming rights to. It’s just as likely that Sentai, Funimation, or someone else could license those rights from the Japanese companies, rather than having to go through Amazon. Until something is announced, or one of the titles officially solicited, we don’t know.

Well a good chunk of there shows are aniplex and pony canyon so they will likey come out though them.

Mawdryn wrote:

I never encountered any of that, but not every cable system's Video On Demand is the same.

I know it cropped up a few times with Time Warner cable which was pretty rough when you didn't have internet access to just jump online to watch elsewhere.

You know what Mr Sevakis I'll go one step further by saying that having all anime on one streaming service is better competition for consumers than having multiple ones. I don't give a shit about the anime studios

If you don't care about anime studios why watch their products?

A single streaming service is cheaper for me than having multiple so better for me. Having 3 stores in my town selling Pepsi doesn't cost me anything multiple streaming sites do.

Sure provided one of two or stores isn't selling the pepsi for a dollar or so more than the one store that doesn't and you willfully buy from those two stores anyway.

A single streaming service forces the anime studios to release quality product every time so that consumers choose there anime to watch at a trusted level of quality over choosing other studios who may release cheap rubbish. To me is beneficial consumer competition not multiple streaming services.

If you had a single streaming service that featured all content that wouldn't really be a competition since they would have an unfair advantage the other services wouldn't have or be able to overcome.

You didn't have to go to separate book stores to buy a Random House book vs. a Hachette book.

Perhaps more importantly, we should ask the following: why does Amazon Prime's Anime Strike continue to have the double paywall? Why does Hulu still insist on having limited commercials for the $7.95/month subscribers? Why does Netflix not do weekly anime simulcasts outside of Japan? Before people answer with things like "because ads help run the site" or "that's what the licensing agreement said", remember this: all 3 companies have over $1 billion. I think they are big enough to have a single monthly premium to air uncensored, weekly anime streams in their respective available territories.

The more people branch away from Crunchyroll, the more likely I would assume my dreams of their quality going up to be better. I also absolutely hate the fact that they're still the only site I know that's running a flash video player. It's 2017...what the hell man? I been using HTML5 on youtube since 2010...

In a Reddit AMA from last year, CEO Kun Gao was asked directly why they don't support HTML5 video, and at the time he cited contractural reasons: they are required to protect their video streams AND run ads, and right now Flash is the only sane way to do that. HTML5's protected streaming was (and really, still is) so hard to implement that it remains out of reach for many companies, and video advertising over HTML5 is still not ready.

I don't think you've spent enough time around gamers. A lot of people were extremely annoyed when EA started making their titles exclusive to their own Origin service, and I don't know a single person who enjoys needing to create a useless UPlay account for Ubisoft's library, even when playing them through Steam. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a decent number of people just decided to pirate those titles instead. The majority of PC gamers want everything in one Lord Gaben-run place.

I watch anime I don't care who produces it just like I don't care who makes my TV as long as it's good value. When I go to the cinema the company that made the film is irrelevant.

Admittedly I don't spend a whole lot of time around gamers, but limiting the scope to PC games is moving the goalposts closer for the video game industry. Do gamers insist that Nintendo Switch and other console games run on PCs, or vice versa? Do gamers insist that Steam carry retro games from the 80s/90s/00s? Not that I know of -- they seem (or seemed) okay with getting modern PC games from Steam, and old SNES games from the Virtual Console or whatever it's called now. Otoh, anime viewers hate on CR and other legal services for not having enough oldschool anime (while curiously also calling the one-week delay for free viewing a critical deal-breaker), and wouldn't accept a legal site that specialized in a broadly-popular genre and era of anime like shounen/action/adventure made after 2010.

Beyond that, gamers accept that individual games still have monetary value, while anime viewers want to drive the price of episodes and entire series to negligible ranges by insisting on unlimited access to as much as possible for as little as possible. That wouldn't be so bad if it were just anime streaming, but now they want streaming sites to include download/ownership options as well.

It would be competition between those making the content who want people watching there content to get higher fees from Netflix that's the competition we need not 'competition' that means I'm paying $8 each for 4 streaming services instead of $20 for 1.

.....You paying for 4 different streaming services is kind of more of a problem of your own making then it simply being the fault of the companies who create and run those streaming services.