Year In Review: CrunchyRoll Hax Taints 2009
Crunchyroll began the year in 2009 in 2008, actually, by announcing its whole “we are going legit!” thing. I don’t want to talk about their hax of a business model, but I do want to talk about how it impact my anime-viewing life since the switch.
Still, a little background if you didn’t already know: Crunchyroll provides free streaming anime, and users are tiered by a subscription plan in which paying users can get to streams that are available earlier. That is the good o’ speed/exclusivity thing that partly made me plunk down $(3.99*1.07)*26) for all of Xam’d last year. But what sold me even more was their partners: Fuji TV and TV Tokyo? Those organizations wear the pants (probably) in those anime committees that ultimately owns those properties! Despite the fairly slim lineup Crunchyroll had at the beginning of 2008, their “simulcast” lineup ballooned last season, with more shows every season since their meager start. It made paying users a very good value proposition, for about $50-60 a year, so it was more just a leap of faith for people subscribing to their pay plans before they announced anything besides Naruto and the like.
What little did I know then, though, is that Crunchyroll is serious business. It might be fair to say that for English-language fans in North America, 2009 is the year of the simulcast. Or in warez kiddy terms, 0-day fansubs. Of course, it’s streaming only, but for most fansub consumers it doesn’t make much of a difference. CR is sufficiently user friendly, the video quality is good enough, and the only problem left is price and availability. I deliberately did not title this post “Year In Review: Simulcast Taints 2009″ is because, well, only Crunchyroll is a real player in simulcasting. Their only serious competition is Funimation and Viz, and let’s just say Funi have only one or two shows that I wanted to follow and Viz has zero, and couldn’t even follow those shows via simulcasting because it was not available due to Funi’s immature delivery platform. I ended up following only one other simulcast title this year not using Crunchyroll, and that is Shikabane Hime on Hulu. [Okay, technically I did not follow it same-day, but I did for a couple weeks.]
And here is part of the rub. Crunchyroll is actually run by people who are experienced in this new media nonsense. By that I mean, well for example, they’ve got a TechCrunch/CrunchBase entry. It’s a pure-bred Silicon Valley start-up. What is Funimation (or any other major player in the US space)? And LOL, what is VIZ(’s)??? How does Crunchyroll spend its money in comparison? At the end of the day, it feels like Funimation and Viz are trying to do that simulcasting thing on the side. And the results show that.
Let’s be clear, I’m not dissing Funi or Viz; it’s just CR is doing a far better job from my perspective (and Viz acknowledges this by partnering with them, let’s not forget). I don’t want to talk down on Funi’s simulcast thing, because I like that they are even trying, and they’ve gotten better. They may very well be opening the doors to more simulcasts soon. And that’s not even a major part of what Funi (and Viz to some extent) does when it comes to new media (well, aside from that contributes to why I think they’re behind on this category), which is selling/partnering their existing library to bigger, farther reaching online services. I think this new digital video delivery space has a lot of life and I hope Funi the best on their next simulcast title that I care about, because, man, it sucked to be a One Piece fan. Maybe that’s the rub–I just don’t care about their simulcast titles because there are so few of them.
Still, if ventures like Hulu, despite being so successful as an attention magnet, can’t turn a profit, what can we expect from Funimation’s lesser online efforts? Crunchyroll attacks the online video thing with vigor, at the least, even if we don’t see any real results or anything tangible from it. Still, if the sample size of one counts for anything, I stopped downloading fansubs of shows that are, well, simulcasted! I just watch it off CrunchyRoll, and for some shows that’s the maximum amount of engagement I could be bothered with anyways (I’m looking at you, Sasameki Koto and White Album).
Or at least, I have been lucky enough that none of the CR shows critically hit my weak spots and no anime pushed all my buttons, as I may have to resort to more drastic measures. But more importantly, it feels as if my CR subscription fees went to good use as I used CR to feed about 1/3 of my total anime input this past half year. They increased the number of licenses drastically across all of 2009.
I also feel the need to address the quality of their services. The first few months of Crunchyroll was pretty spotty, if not outright bad. It got much better as the summer months rolled by. Now it’s much better, although still could be a lot better; namely it takes a lot of system resources still to playback smoothly at higher resolutions. Its partnership with Boxee is too a step in the right direction, and relatively early in the game.
Is CR’s streaming delivery experience superior or inferior than what I was experiencing before via traditional digisubs? It’s clearly inferior, I think, but it’s also good enough for someone who can’t be bothered to keep track of what is out where and by whom when, and want it on demand, at least as long as it’s on a networked, flash-capable computer. Presumably I think that describes far most of us. I mean, it’s just a little bit worse off than Hulu.
There is a second consequence to the fact that there’s a legalized gateway to 0-day fansubs, and that is the creator-user relationship. My IP professor would always boil down the idea of intellectual property as a way to balance the role of the artist, the publisher, and the consumer. I talked about that silly contest from Directions, the company publishing Time of Eve on CR, and the subsequent creator-audience interaction. That’s the stuff that tickle a fan’s heart, right? It’s not about entitlement or rights, or at least, ones tainted by the sense of unfairness as measured by cost. You can see how people feel butt hurt about Crunchyroll here, but who gives a damn a year and half later? They were bringing anime to the fans in a way the creators and publishers can recognize, invest and promote.
It’s always a pity if legalism gets in the way of the spirit of the thing.
Year in Review 2009:
Since I watch most of my anime on an ipod these days, I’d love a Crunchyroll app that would let me cache “streams” on the ipod for viewing in a disconnected fashion — rather like Kindle for the iPhone works for books.
Alternatively, being able to get subtitled anime through the iTunes store would be okay, too, I guess.
(Hmm, checking the iTunes store, I see there’s a Joost app. I will have to check that out (though Joost doesn’t appear to have that many series that interest me).)
good point. the pmp market will keep dto alive for some time…
“It might be fair to say that for English-language fans in North America, 2009 is the year of the simulcast”
Speaking as someone outside of North America, there have been obvious signs that CR recognise there is an audience outside North America and make an effort to tear down region restictions to bring it to them (or at least that’s what they say in their press announcements and other articles). That’s something I have huge respect for and one of the reasons I eventually bought my CR membership.
Although by god does some of their subbing suck
Yes, CR does that too. Good point.
As for subs, yeah, fansub quality by ex-fansubbers!
Your title is rather misleading, though probably deliberately so. If you wanted to be more true to your actual point, it’s more like “tints” and not “taints”. (Unless you mean that it “taints” the competition’s chance of competing on an equal playing field? ^^; )
I can actually think of a few people who would in fact claim that Crunchyroll has “tainted” their anime experience this year, but this seems mostly due to an over-reliance in the past on the goodwill of others. The fact that there actually is a legal outlet for many of the new shows is a great development, even if the quality level can sometimes be a bit reminiscent of speed-subbers. What it’s done overall is bring the anime viewing experience closer to a “broadcast” reality, and that’s a positive step for fandom overall. The people who tend to be most annoyed by this are, of course, people who either can’t or refuse to partake, and so are stuck waiting while the rest of the world moves past them.
But what if he means “taints” as in “the plural of ‘perineum’?”
Personally I still can’t stand watching stuff streamed in a browser, and I’m not sure how anyone can find that a remotely enjoyable experience.
I have a CR subscription to legitimise the fact that I download rips of their releases muxed with non-terrible video so that I can watch them at my own leisure, on my own terms.
I would happily pay two or three times more for my subscription if it included HD downloads of the series they stream, but I think that sort of thinking is still far too advanced for any media companies to even consider.
I follow Brotherhood on Funi, and I’ve seen whole series on Hulu too, but I can’t say I’m very interested in any of Crunchyroll’s seasonal simulcast lineups. Just not my kind of shows. If I recall from an ANNcast, they said everything Crunchyroll gets is filtered through Funimation first to see if they want to license it. So basically Crunchyroll gets all the shows Funi passed on.
What will be a boon for these streaming sites in the future is their growing backlogs. Maybe even in the near future we’ll be able to check out random shows in past seasons streaming rather than having to resort to this torrenting business.
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@JP: LOL. I think I get you. Not sure.
@kadian1364: I’m not sure what you mean by “my kind of shows” but I’m certain that there are people who only watch a few simulcast-able titles a year and it happens to be shows only Funimation or Viz streams. It’s sort of obvious as to the commercial reality of the big hits out there such as the likes of Inuyasha, FMA or Naruto.
One of the biggest underlying point to my post is that the business models for Funimation, Viz and CR are all different. They make money with different types of anime, and they make different kinds of money (if at all) with different types of anime. It’s to say that the online distribution market isn’t monolithic, but thanks to fansubbing there is a particular portion of the online market that we’ve all known to exist for some time–it’s out there, it’s just a matter of capturing it. Someone’s finally doing it as their primary business model.
@omo: well, for PMPs, I suppose they can do a sort of “offline streaming” — the bits are loaded onto the PMP, but discarded by the application when played, or something, if the license-holders don’t like DTO.
@dm: that sort of DRM doesn’t sit well with most people. It’s more likely that wireless broadband becomes widely available (and cheap) and thus overcoming the portability issue. At least as a semi-permanent solution.
@omo: Well, sure. I don’t care much for it, myself. But it’s not that far from what Kindle buyers are buying, and I think a lot of people wouldn’t mind if they had to download an episode in app form whenever they wanted to view it, as long as they didn’t have to pay for it again. Put that way, it’s not so far from streaming-with-a-persistent-buffer.
Why bother when you can just DTO it though, if price is not a factor (as with 99% of Kindle buyers)? You are confusing different business models versus different usage requirements. Which is to say, yeah, wireless streaming is already done today (pandora, last.fm, rhapsody, etc), but it is a different set of user experience along with a different set of $ involved.
If the license holders aren’t ready to accept iTunes money, and prefer to stay in a CrunchyRoll ghetto, they might be willing to accept a “download-to-watch” model just as they’re willing to accept a streaming model.
But sure, streaming to the palmtop might be okay (if people can do it on the train or in the bus).
I think “download-to-anything” triggers a flag, which require a different kind of license agreement and $$$ incurred. Which is to say I’m sure if enough people are willing to pay for reals (not likely at all given the number of Xam’d whiners out there) it could exist.
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