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Answerman - Why Are Anime Torrent Sites Disappearing?

Any basic cable package, let alone higher-tier cable/satellite sports packages, is going to cost more per month than pretty much all of the anime streaming sites combined, Amazon Prime/Strike excepted. To my knowledge, viewers of Western media don't insist that either Netflix or Hulu have every US movie and TV show ever, like anime viewers have demanded, nor are they as resistant to subscribing to both Netflix and Hulu. If one all-inclusive anime-streaming monopoly does develop, are anime viewers going to be accepting of higher prices (i.e. probably what subscribing to multiple competing services would've cost anyway) and worse-quality products?

(Moar to follow?)

Is there an EU release for Rosario + Vampire for example? No, and it doesn't look like there will be any time soon.

If I have to buy it legally, I need the right hardware to play the DVD which includes A WHOLE NEW TV and a BLU-RAY PLAYER that are compatible with multiple regions. I've got the DVD player that plays multiple regions but the edges on the picture are zigzaggy on the TV.

There's either something wrong with your equipment or setup, or you have a rare (or really old) TV that doesn't support 60Hz.

Western media is mainstream though. Japanese media is niche. So of course fans of a niche media form are going to be more demanding and passionate about their hobby. Because you can't easily acquire this stuff just anywhere, especially since the bulk of the fandom lives outside of Japan and does not speak Japanese. For someone outside of Japan, Japanese media is unique, special, and relatively uncommon compared to Western media. That's why people so strongly want to preserve as much of it as possible. I don't think I've ever seen someone demanding access to literally every piece of Japanese media ever made. People just want easy access to a sizable library of new and old stuff for a reasonable price. Maybe a monthly fee would work.

I also think most people who used Bittorrent to watch anime mainly used it for rare out of print anime or older dubs that are no longer available like some older Streamline dubs or the original DiC dub of Sailor Moon.

This has been discussed elsewhere, but in short: the various other English-speaking markets aren't large enough for each of them to have a company doing everything Crunchyroll does. And since Crunchyroll (& the other legit services) is being used as the reason why everyone in the English-speaking world has no excuse to pirate, it seems like the least they could do is actually provide the full service to the whole English-speaking world.

All of those are quite possible via the more shadier avenues. Extremely unlikely to happen, but a man can dream.

Piracy is a service problem, said Gabe Newell, a billionaire.

So where are legal streaming sites supposed to compete on service? Anime viewers have shown that they're fine with watching the exact same subtitles/translations legal sites put out, as bootleg streams for most remotely recent shows = re-encodes of HorribleSubs stream-rips. For that reason, legal streams are already faster than illegal ones. And those viewers are also fine with getting worse technical quality than legal offerings, since re-encoding introduces data loss and video artifacts. Even if a legal site somehow got all the anime with rights extending all over the world, it wouldn't solve the problem of the viewers who have legal options available, but refuse to pay subscription fees or watch ads. Sure looks like a pricing problem to me.

I think streaming sites need to add services or content or goods

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I think streaming sites need to add services or content or goods

How did Omakase work out?

The top-tier Crunchroll sub I took out for a year for manga access a month before they opened manga access to all subs had incentives for their store (useless for me given the shipping costs and import duty) and some sort of incentive for US conventions (nullified slightly by the international flight costs)

Many of us are dependent on torrents because of the BULLSH*T!!!!! region restrictions on DVD's and blu-rays.

And I have seen numerous people demanding that an official distribution site have "everything," both on MAL and various YouTube comment threads, before they'll patronize it. Of course, then you check their lists and see that they have watched or plan to watch maybe a handful of titles made before 2005 or so. But what constitutes a "sizeable" library?

The anime viewerbase is an expert at moving the goalposts -- before CR went legitimate, it was "we need a legal way to sample airing anime before it comes out, like Japanese TV viewers do"; now it's "we need streaming access to absolutely everything for next to nothing, including non-televised movies, OVAs, and specials."

Life indeed finds a way. Look up the history of piratebay. They survived police raids, the imprisonment of the founder and other fun stuff. The Deep Web will always be the last resort but there are literately thousands of other avenues, google even lists them above legal sites (let´s maybe look into that one...), to burn though before such a drastic measure would be taken by the scene.
When one door closes, another two piracy sites open.

They were still MAKING VCRs?

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Another anime torrent site that specialized in archival of older anime recently locked off access to the general public and went members-only.

...is this. I was pretty sure I knew what site this was referring to, and I was right (Not sure if it wasn't named because Justin just didn't know or if he was specifically avoiding it, so I'll ere on the side of caution). And apparently it's exclusive to anyone who was a member before the change. I didn't really get older anime from any other site, and there doesn't seem to be that much demand for it, so I'm not sure there'll be a good replacement.

Sure you could! In theory, anyway.

After all people have put viruses in _image files_ on the web like jpg or gif. All you need is a web browser with a buggy image reading library with a memory overrun and when it tries to read the malformed image you end up overwriting memory, etc etc.

The same is totally possible for video files. It would depend on the specific video player software you use, but let's take something like vlc for example. I'm sure there is some tiny codec buried in there with ancient buggy decoding that someone could shove into a mkv into a hidden channel that could in theory do mischief.

So "you just can't" is false. Has anyone ever actually done this successfully? Not sure.

The difference is that you're giving cheap change to watch something on a giant ass screen, with a better quality and on a better environment.

But yeah, i would have gotten a CR sub a long while ago if they had anything worth it. <.<

After your insight I would say "Most illegal consumption of legally licensed anime in your country hurts the industry." Some would give the impression that the MINORITY of illegal consumption hurts the industry, while without numbers I'd wager the MAJORITY of illegal consumption hurts the industry. I suppose its arguing peanuts at his point.

2) Not one legal streaming website has access to most of the content. Think about it for a moment, AFAIK in the USA to get your sport fix you either pay to your local TV cable company or DirecTV or Dish Networks (or some other source I am unaware off). The key word here is "or". Would sports fans be ok if they had to pay to three or four different companies to get their sport fix? The statistics BigOnAnime provided make me think that neither do anime fans. Exclusive contracts on the long run are adversely affecting streaming, I hope the japan anime industry stops thinking about streaming as if websites were game consoles, exclusives are inevitable only if you they pay 100% for the production costs (then they clearly own it) of said content like Netflix does.

And I have seen numerous people demanding that an official distribution site have "everything," both on MAL and various YouTube comment threads, before they'll patronize it. Of course, then you check their lists and see that they have watched or plan to watch maybe a handful of titles made before 2005 or so. But what constitutes a "sizeable" library? The anime viewerbase is an expert at moving the goalposts -- before CR went legitimate, it was "we need a legal way to sample airing anime before it comes out, like Japanese TV viewers do"; now it's "we need streaming access to absolutely everything for next to nothing, including non-televised movies, OVAs, and specials."

"Everything" is too broad a term and technically unattainable and TBT oldies are not very popular unless the director dies or there is a remake and even then they will never compete with what is "hot from the oven". How about "everything from this season"? To repeat a comparison I did before, Nowadays you can get your "TV" media from getting a contract with your local cable company or directv or dish networks or etc. People argue the cost is too high (and therefore the cable cutting), but everyone can agree that it would be mind boggling if you had to make a contract with your local cable company and directv and dish networks and etc so that you could get access to HBO + showtime + disney channel (aka the popular stuff). That is what is happening atm in the minds of many with the Funi/CR+Amazon Strike+Netflix or Hulu stratification.

This got me thinking: There is a lot of discussion about older series, older music, and so and so forth that are not available legally. And it makes me wonder if there is a comparable streaming/torrenting community or demand for older media that isn't Japanese as well. After all, someone in France who wants to watch, say, The Pirates of Dark Water might not have any options without paying through the nose. Are there comparable sites for western animation, movies, comic books, and so forth? (I'm not requesting any links, just wanting to know if they exist.)

Huh, I was wondering which one it was, whether they'd allow new members as a means of cutting down on their bandwidth and/or public visibility, like what happened with Galbadia Hotel (video game music), or if they cut off membership entirely, like with LUE (a forum on GameFAQs).

To me, that comes across as the equivalent of children clutching their toys closer to their chests when their parents request to let them go. "Nooo! It's mine!"

Spectrum is another one (formerly Time Warner Cable). They gained a lot of infamy for being the only host of SportsNet, which some baseball teams signed up on as the only provider for live games (presumably for a huge amount of money), then even more infamy when both SportsNet and TWC would proudly boast in their advertisements of being "Home of the _____" or "The onlyplace where you can watch the _____," which fans took to rubbing in their faces that they either can't watch it or have to pay $100+ per month just to watch them.

Of course, it could also be self-justification, as no one wants to feel like they're the bad guys.