Coop and Steve ponder the streaming landscape and how ridiculously impossible they've made it to get a decent screencap.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Trigun Stampede, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, Star Driver, Tomorrow's Joe, and Dan Da Dan is available on Crunchyroll. Delicious in Dungeon, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Great Pretender, Tiger & Bunny 2, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean are streaming on Netflix. One Piece is available on both Crunchyroll and Netflix. Gushing Over Magical Girls, Akiba Maid War, and Urusei Yatsura (2022) are streaming on HiDive. Uzumaki is available on MAX.
Coop
After stuffing our faces with leftovers over the weekend, I'd imagine that most of us were scrolling through twenty streaming services while trying not to fall asleep on the couch. Oddly enough, that reminds me of an anime-specific topic that's been on my mind for a little bit now. Steve, my column comrade, do you subscribe to any given streaming service because you want to peruse its catalog, or is it primarily for work?
Steve
Well, Coop, like any millennial with a hobby, I started doing something I genuinely enjoyed and then found a way to turn it into a side hustle because late capitalism and the gig economy have unmoored us all from any sense of stable employment. But to answer your question more directly, a little column A, a little column B. How about you?
Ain't that the cold, hard truth...
I'd say I'm very much in the same boat, Steve. Unless it's a service I'm sharing with friends or family, it really depends on the season's offerings if I'm going to re-up for a specific service on my own. A great example of this is Crunchyroll, where I had a sub pretty much consistently through the run of Trigun Stampede and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury in 2023. However, it's only been if I need it for work since then. Oh, and I used a free trial of Max to watch Uzumaki too. Those savings probably bought me a sandwich.
Oh yeah, I'm all about family password sharing. I pay for Hulu, my parents pay for Netflix, my brother gets Max, and so on. I don't know how anyone is supposed to keep up with this increasingly fragmented (and expensive!) ecosystem otherwise. Come to think of it, though, the only streaming services I keep up with for my own solo perusal are the anime ones. And the fact that I use them for work factors into that.
I posed a similar "pleasure vs. work" question to my followers on Bluesky a few weeks back, and they seem to approach these services in a similar manner. However, I would recommend taking
my anecdotal findings with a grain of salt given the small sample size.
But going back to the topic of perusal, I forget what's all on a given service half the time. It's like I'm hit with a lack of anime object permanence. I'm more likely to watch a series to the end if I have it on Blu-ray or DVD. I need something to taunt me on my shelf for months until I finally check it out... Just like Escaflowne did until this past weekend.
It doesn't help that all of these streaming libraries are ephemeral and constantly changing. I rely on Letterboxd now to tell me which service(s) a movie happens to be on at that particular time. With anime, though, it's more likely for a show's license to simply expire and disappear with little fanfare. For example, with Yoji Enokido's name popping back up in the news tonight (I'm doing my best not to derail this column into screaming about GQuuuuuuX), I thought it'd be cool to revisit the much-maligned Captain Earth a decade later. Except it's gone now. Reduced to atoms. Unless you own it on Blu-ray.
Your mention of Enokido reminded me that
Star Driver had been absent from streaming for years... Not to mention that the Blu-rays are tough to find. It was a nice surprise to see it sitting there on Crunchyroll now. But as you said, it'll be a question of how long these series will be available in the long run.
And speaking of surprises, I almost fell out of my chair when Tomorrow's Joe started streaming. Unless it's a dedicated service like RetroCrush, it's increasingly rare to see a foundational classic title streaming elsewhere. Or if a classic is elsewhere, it's often buried by the eighty-three isekai series produced in any given year.
Sadly, that's not a problem unique to anime services, either. Every so often, I see a tweet/skeet tallying the number of movies available on Netflix that were made before 1980, and it's always like a baker's dozen at most. It's sad.
And I mean, personally, I think what should be the great advantage of streaming is a large and readily available library of classics. I'd much rather digest that than guzzle down the bucketfuls of service-exclusive slop most streaming giants prioritize instead. Even Crunchyroll tried to get on that "originals" train, and I think the only reason it fizzled out is that anime is already scarily cheap to produce as-is.
I'm reminded of Netflix's original anime efforts as well...and it's been a mixed bag outside of
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,
Great Pretender, and a small handful of titles. Though, I do quite like that the service has veered away from dumping series all at once. For one, I'd imagine it gives creatives more time to make any small changes before any airs if need be. And two, weekly airings allow the audience to really rally around their show.
Delicious in Dungeon and (to a lesser extent) DAN DA DAN would've been left to languish if they suffered the same fate as Stone Ocean and Tiger & Bunny 2. Not to mention the technical blemishes both series displayed near the end of their first drops. Man, Tiger & Bunny 2 going right under the rug really stung me...
There's no shortage of streaming follies we could cover, but since this column is more about our personal relationships with these services, I'm going to take this opportunity to gripe about minor stuff I've come to find extraordinarily annoying.
First off, as regular readers may have noticed, we tend to use a lot of screenshots in this column. Heck, this column would not exist if not for the ubiquity of anime streaming and the ability to screencap it. But it seems like these streaming services are trying to kneecap us instead at every turn. Practically every one of them now employs DRM across a wide swathe of platforms that disables the ability to take screenshots. To circumvent that, I have a separate browser installed with hardware acceleration disabled exclusively so I can take screencaps to use in this column. It's madness.
Yeah... In addition to all that, difficulties with screen-capping might've been why I ponied up for a Blu-ray drive...
You shouldn't have to do this just to capture a picture that makes you say, "Oh, that's so funny."
It's free advertising, and every single big corporation hates it. I don't understand. And then, when I do use my workarounds to get nice screenshots, I have to work extra for them. Do you see this? Do you see that UI at the bottom? Do you know how many hours of my life I've lost waiting a few seconds for that to disappear so I can get a clear frame? I don't know either, but it's a very non-zero number.
Not to mention the speedrunner-esque claw you'll often have to maintain to get that good shot, too...
I literally have a game controller configured so I can take screenshots more ergonomically. Thankfully, most services nowadays will clear the UI from a paused screen after a few seconds, so you don't
really need a trigger finger (just patience), but it used to be worse. I remember several variations of Funimation's player where I could not pause to get a good shot. The UI would never go away. They hated me.
Netflix is fun, though, because it does the opposite and adds an overlay after you've paused for a few moments so that you can't dawdle on.
But on the bright side, I guess that DAN DA DAN's presence on both CR and Netflix allows you to pick your screenshotting poison. Come to think of it, I can't recall many shows that've simultaneously aired on two separate services (Maybe Hulu and Disney+ even though they're practically the same now?). I like that as an option for viewers. Especially because they won't have to sign up for another service to watch one show. I hope we see this release strategy again.
It's neat, but I doubt it will ever be the norm. There's just not a lot of incentive for streamers to play nice with each other. Everyone wants to be the biggest fish. But that competition is also a good thing. I'm glad, for instance, that HiDive is still hanging in there, staving off the total Crunchyroll monopoly. Also, to hop back on my soapbox, they have the single nicest UI for screen-capping in the anime sphere. Hitting pause flashes a button in the middle of the screen that immediately disappears, and no further UI elements pop up unless you move the mouse. Every web video player should work like that. Capital job, HIDive. The only thing you're missing is a keyboard shortcut to turn the subtitles off/on.
You do have to give them props for the adjustable subtitle color too... Then again, I think the last time I watched anything on HIDive was back when
Akiba Maid War and the new
Urusei Yatsura were airing in the fall of 2022. But you've gotta give them points for going on off the beaten path from time to time.
Oh, how I miss the girls at the Oinky Doink Cafe.
Look, someone had to stream
Gushing Over Magical Girls this year, and only HiDive was brave enough to take up the task. I salute them.
I can't help but suspect, though, that we're well past the streaming ecosystem's best years. Enshittification has more or less metastasized as prices keep going up without comparable improvements to the services or their libraries. I mean, Crunchyroll is ripping One Piece out of the general public's hands as we speak. The honeymoon is over.
Well, with streaming continuing to go downstream, we might as well enjoy what's there while it lasts.... and hope for a Blu-ray or two.
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