Lately Crunchy have been signing up more and more distributors to their online streaming. However the real question is, can they replace fansubs.
Both crunchy and the distributors seem to feel they can, but lets face it, that’s a pipe dream with no basis in reality.
CrunchyRoll is the worst site in the world, and the only reason they’re now successful is because of the years they had illegal fansubs up, building a following.
However, their initial foray into legal streaming proved they didn’t have what it takes. They ended up having to rely on another company to do their translations, and even botched up the encoding of their releases, resulting in some pretty low quality huge files.
However due to their size, they pretty much had a ready made market. From there it went from bad to worse.
Their next set of releases, Kurogane no Linebarrels and Tower of Druga season 2, proved they were still the useless crap site they were when they started. Kurogane had bad encoding, and seriously inconsistent subs, in both formatting and content.
Now they’ve launched a new premium service where you get the shows at the same time as Japan (or within an hour). Given the number of shows they’re offering these days I decided to give it a try and forked over my hard earned cash.
One problem, and a huge one, I wasted my money. All these shows that I’d been following as fansubs that were now on Crunchy weren’t available. But hang on, I just forked my cash gimme my shows damn it!!
Unfortunately Crunchy seem to be of the belief that no one outside of the US watches anime and blocks the vast majority of shows to anyone outside of the US. TBH I found this damned funny in a way, they’ll take your money but won’t tell you that you’re not going to get any releases cause you’re not a yank.
Their subs quality seems to have improved this third time around, but lets face it, if fans can’t access the shows then they won’t pay and they won’t move away from fansubs. In fact a large number of people that had signed up and paid for the new premium service turned around and filed complaints with Pay Pal and recovered their fees. Sure it’s only $7, but it’s blatant theft to promote a service you won’t deliver IMO.
The only way for Crunchy to ever be a contender for beating fansubs is for them to make their shows region free (something they can do) and to offer the digital downloads again. Frankly the premium service should be scrapped all together and replaced with a small fee to download.
Or better yet, scrap Crunchy all together and join up with Bost TV who are better by a long shot.
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April 14, 2009 @ 20:27.
now now, lets not be hasty on the bashing. I’ll agree that CR was formerly the shittiest fucking site in existence, but I think it’s too soon in their new development to bash on them so hard. This is the case of a non-professional site suddenly going corporate so it’s no surprise that they are going to stumble around for a while, but I think that if we give them a little time they can probably fix things. Also, while it’s undoubtably wrong to allow you to pay when you can’t use the service, it’s no surprise that the videos are inaccessible outside of the US because that is the case with most streaming sites, actually, from what I’ve seen. Even ANN usually only streams inside the States.