Omo on the streamed anime today

Published: Sun 13 December 2009
By Author

In bost.

And when we say "streamed anime", we mean "Crunchyroll". Because:

[O]nly 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.

[...] 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.

Emphasis mine. And now, I'm going to invoke Cato again and proclaim that I really, really, want Crunchyroll to think about expanding DTO offerings. Omo himself admits it would be nicer:

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.

Mind, I'm not against streaming in all cases (even though I know that Flash is evil; I would be against Theora to the same extent). Right now I'm watching Akazukin, which is a terrific show for small children, which I have no intention of ever watching again. And so, streaming it is all right, even if screencapping is a major pain. In fact, I would not want to shell out $2 per episode of that, so everyone wins with streaming. Nonetheless, in general the heavy emphasis on streaming makes me sad. It's not the new world I wanted to live in.

I'm especially sad that there's no way to "buy up into ownership" in the current situation. When compared to a regular fan, one could say that I roll in money. My profeciency in spoken Japanese is where essentially I can go in armed with a pause button and my Wordtank. So, I could easily import DVDs and BDs. But even so, for how long? Once studios see that they can capture everyone with streaming, I expect them to stop printing ownership tokens entirely.

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