Quite a few people got their panties in a wad over the Crunchyroll last week; the industry-leaning inhabitants of AoD forums especially were bubbling. I didn't cover the PR condemnations by Funi et.al. because I assumed everyone knew about it anyway, and it would play itsef out in time. Also, the site was years old (a blogger wrote that his japanese teacher suggested to look at Crunchyroll). And guess what, the story is playing itself. J.P. sez:

So I’m kind of confused about what to think about this whole Crunchyroll development. At first, I thought “Oh noes! They’re getting venture capital to use on making money off of other people’s work!” Of course, then I realized “Wait, Nico Nico serves ads too.” Then, when Gonzo announced that they would partner with them to release some shows, I was excited since maybe now the industry will be able to lurch towards some kind of speedy internet delivery for its content.

Indeed. And:

Even commercials in the streams aren’t so bad. When I watched an episode of Bubblegum Crisis on AOL’s streaming service, there would be one 15 second, unskippable commercial every 10 minutes. That’s a lot better than even broadcast TV gives. The problem there, however is that it is often pointless with international viewers. [...]

I expect this to be something the magic of geolocation can fix. If BOST adjust their content for regions today, surely splicing ads into a video should not be too difficult? Granted, dorks who wrote the ADV's website managed to fail this task and so I their video stream terminates for me on the ad boundary. But I hope, perhaps irrationally, that it's nothing more than imminently fixable incompetence.

Also, same place:

After reading these reports, I actually went to Crunchyroll for the first time in probably a year. I was actually surprised by how much unlicensed anime was on there. There was the occasional Naruto or Bleach, which is always eye-rolling, along with a few currently-airing titles like Erosario + Vampire and Clannad, but the majority of the titles for the 100 or so pages that I looked through were really old titles that would in all likelihood never be licensed. I’m talking titles like Marvelous Melmo, which was a sex ed instructional series produced by Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka, if you didn’t know, was a licensed medical doctor with a Ph.D. in biology.

I didn't know.