Damien Kellis reports on the streaming anime service BOST. In short: it's a Flash video. Think prepaid YouTube in higher resolution. Read the post if you're interested in details.

Damien has screenshots of their launch title, Cellphone Girl, which are fairly breathtaking. I haven't seen such pretty fanservicy designs in a while, perhaps since Ninja Nonsense, only now they are in bikinis. As far as outright beauty goes, few can touch Megumi from Ramen Fighter Miki, but it's a somewhat different axis of measurement.

UPDATE: TNK raises the question of buying to own. It would not be my concern in this case. I consider BOST a PPV service, to be used to check out series before buying DVDs.

And another thing: Flash is, of course, nasty. However, Adobe at least has committed to have it working on Linux. A standalone player would most likely be a deal breaker for me.

BTW, BOST sends the password in the cleartext in the activation e-mail. Anyone wants to bet if they store it hashed in their database? Also, the login session does not seem encrypted. The problem is not so much that university sysadmins and ISP workers are going to watch some anime for free now. It's much worse, because I'm going to use PayPal. And at least in case of Virgin Mobile USA, they require a service agreement and then deduct money from PayPal. If BOST does the same without SSL, I'm going to frown very, very hard.