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The Mike Toole Show - Stream Warriors

Ah, online legal streaming. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have my share of memories surrounding it. My first foray into it had to be [adult swim]'s on-site video service, where I watched a few episodes of Eureka seveN before their premieres (episode 50, I watched in its full uncut glory days before the infamous "Eureka Severed" incident), the final episode of Death Note, and episode 14 of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in a series of individual clips after my VCR failed to record the show as it usually did one week.

I remember Gaia Online had a short-lived anime streaming feature around 2007 or 2008 where you could sample the first few episodes of select Funimation titles in a virtual movie theater while chatting/MSTing/throwing popcorn at the screen.

If you want to talk about obscure anime streaming services, anybody remember the video game subscription service Gametap? In addition to games, they also had a service called "Gametap TV" that came free with a paid subscription. It really didn't amount to much; basically it aired a bunch of original animated shorts like Computer Lab and old episodes of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, but what was really interesting was they actually had the streaming rights to *one* anime: ADV's dub of Mezzo.

What's funny is that they never even got around to streaming the entire show; they stopped about halfway through once the series started getting a bit too racy. But from my brief Gametap subscription, I was able to learn about this show so that I could rent the DVDs from Netflix and finish the series. To this day the show's one of my guilty pleasures, and I ironically enough have Gametap to thank for it.

I wish Anime Sols would've survived on a bit longer. They're how I discovered Oniisama e/Dear Brother.

Viki is another basically defunct anime service (they still have an anime section, but with one title). They did an interview with ANN back in 2012 where they admitted to not really knowing what they were doing with anime, but, y'know...they were trying! They unfortunately never got Candy Candy.

Thanks Mike for not letting the origin of CR disappear! I was using CR and Box-Torrents when the call came with the question of whether BT should accept backing from a major money source to go "public" as a streaming site. The purists gave a resounding "NO" so as not to be sell-outs and the rest is history. BT may one day be history too, though I still check in once in a while (now is BakaBT). Maybe one day you can cover the BT drama where Box was ousted by his volunteer mods when they found how much of the donations he kept and they took over the site (as it stands today)?

There's no way for Box to go legitimate. It worked for CR because they were a streaming platform. Box is torrent.