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NEWS: Crunchyroll to Halt Ad-Supported Streaming Starting With Spring 2022 Season

They should get anime, but ideally it should be through companies that are actually located in those markets, and have a better understanding of viewers' languages, cultures, preferences, and economic situations. US anime distributors should not be expected to service the entire world and take on every risk. If CR and the like are providing a paltry or inadequate selection to these regions, surely there's room for local competitors to enter the market -- the US-based juggernauts can't simultaneously be too dominating and too neglectful.

I don't know, why do you feel the need to throw out "Yar har fiddle-dee-dee" one-liners every time this topic comes up? I would say that the piracy-driven crash of 2007 drove distributors and dubbing companies whose work I enjoyed (such as Geneon / Bandai / CPM / New Generation Pictures / Ocean / etc.) out of the anime business, but believe it or not, I'm not against piracy itself. I'm against the dishonesty, ignorance, and hypocrisy that so often goes along with it, and since Newell/Steam are the ones propagating the "service problem" lie, I make fun of them when pirates give away the game and reveal that piracy in well-served regions is really about the money.

Even if the ads on CR had more variety and were perfectly placed at the original eyecatch point and before/after OP/ED (i.e. where they were in the original broadcasts, where Japanese fans somehow survived them just fine), there'd still be complaints and Jolly-Roger waving over "breaking my immersion."

I don't know how anyone managed to use Crunchyroll without paying for it. So many things are locked behind the subscription...

Maybe I'm just not thinking about it from the right angle, but I really can't see how this benefits the company. I only see them losing viewers from this move.

Zalis116 wrote:

I don't know, why do you feel the need to throw out "Yar har fiddle-dee-dee" one-liners every time this topic comes up? I would say that the piracy-driven crash of 2007 drove distributors and dubbing companies whose work I enjoyed (such as Geneon / Bandai / CPM / New Generation Pictures / Ocean / etc.) out of the anime business, but believe it or not, I'm not against piracy itself. I'm against the dishonesty, ignorance, and hypocrisy that so often goes along with it, and since Newell/Steam are the ones propagating the "service problem" lie, I make fun of them when pirates give away the game and reveal that piracy in well-served regions is really about the money. Even if the ads on CR had more variety and were perfectly placed at the original eyecatch point and before/after OP/ED (i.e. where they were in the original broadcasts, where Japanese fans somehow survived them just fine), there'd still be complaints and Jolly-Roger waving over "breaking my immersion."

Look, I'll freely admit that I'm rather glib in my replies to articles about this topic, but that's because I find so much of how the industry presents the issue to be laughable at best. (Hell, just yesterday we had an ANN headline offering further proof that the MPAA will never live down the "download a car" nonsense.) If you want a more measured response, I think this is a bad decision for Crunchyroll, at least in terms of optics if not financials. I do agree with several earlier posts that this probably won't affect their bottom line all that much: they can't be making a massive amount of profit from ad impressions, and the small percentage of free users that wind up subscribing will probably make up for it, or at least get near enough not to matter. But it's just a bad look to me: here you have this avenue where people can still legally support the industry for free in some small way, one that's existed for as long as Crunchyroll has been a legal service, and now it's being phased out. And it's being done with the full knowledge that anyone who's not willing to jump on board and start paying will almost certainly find their way to one of a myriad of shady illegal streaming sites out there. Kind of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge decision, at at least in my opinion.

As far as what you said about the 2007 crash, I disagree that piracy was the root cause, though I'm not naive enough to think that it wasn't a factor. From that legendary Geneon episode of ANNCast as well as other articles I've read over the years, the real issue seemed to be that of an inflationary bubble. Domestic distributors were all trying to outbid each other and snap up every single license they could, sometimes paying out six-figures-per-episode contracts for titles that had zero hope of ever recouping that investment. (Good ol' Heat Guy J...) Domestic releases still almost entirely consisted of paying $30 for 3- or 4-episode singles, with discounted collections only coming much later (if ever), and the industry was far too sluggish to pivot to more consolidated sets. Even the most popular series would take months or even years to make their way stateside. Then the global financial crisis hit, and the bottom completely fell out.

I say all of this because I know we've had a back-and-forth about the "service problem" strawman before, and here's the thing: just as it proved to be true in the case of Steam, it also proved true for the anime industry. I mean come on, Crunchyroll is literally the embodiment of giving (most) people what they want, and seeing fabulous success in doing so! Legal streaming became a thing, and then simulcasts and simuldubbing, and people were getting their anime about as quickly as viewers in Japan were. And Crunchyroll's subscriber counts have shown that a lot of people are more than willing to pay for it. Even on the physical release side you saw the retirement of singles in favor of 13-episode sets, with plenty of cheaper re-releases, and obviously those have worked well too because they've been a fixture for over a decade. Now are there still people who will exclusively pirate despite all of these other options? Of course, and there always will be. You're never going to eliminate piracy. But there are also a hell of a lot of people willing to pay for these new ways for consuming anime, because their own needs are being served by what the industry has accomplished over the past decade.

Mune wrote:

If you think waiting 3 months to watch something for free is too long, I'm calling you entitled. As a child, I had to wait years from the initial air date and months between episodes, (oh, the dark ages of anime or as some call them, the age of great anime).

Yes, clearly things should never get better, because they weren't good when you were a child. What a smart and totally not psychotic viewpoint on things.

JoelBurger wrote:

Mune wrote: If you think waiting 3 months to watch something for free is too long, I'm calling you entitled. As a child, I had to wait years from the initial air date and months between episodes, (oh, the dark ages of anime or as some call them, the age of great anime). Yes, clearly things should never get better, because they weren't good when you were a child. What a smart and totally not psychotic viewpoint on things.

I love all the ageist comments on here. I guess that it's ok to call people out and ridicule them on their age. Everything else is as always off-the-table. Inclusion and safe space my ass as my kids would say

Could you elaborate on what Geneon said?

I would say that the piracy-driven crash of 2007 drove distributors and dubbing companies whose work I enjoyed (such as Geneon / Bandai / CPM / New Generation Pictures / Ocean / etc.) out of the anime business, but believe it or not, I'm not against piracy itself.