Streaming service Crunchyroll raises prices weeks after killing its free tier

Sony has made streaming anime pricier since buying Crunchyroll.

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[Dark Jaguar]

Are we profitable and people love us?
Yes!
But wait, what about if we made...more?
You crazy SOB, keep talking!

Not "what if", MUST. If they don't make more than last year, they're dead, DEAD!

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Crunchyroll has been making their subtitles worse:


View: https://youtu.be/B-DX0Zolr6g

• Font quality is awful
• Timing no longer lines up properly
• Subs are cut off mid-sentence
• Characters speaking over each other is rendered as stacks of dialog with no identifiers
• Typesetting is no longer being performed (replacing Japanese characters on-screen with localized text). This means reading on-screen text is no longer an option

Crunchroll, up to a few months ago, used an anime-centric open source tool, Aegisub. The downsides to Aegisub are that it requires skill to use, and that doing things "right" requires a significant amount of time for each localization (read: more headcount).

As of a few months ago, Crunchyroll moved to using Ooona, a tool that has zero support for typesetting, along with none of the anime-centric details that Aegisub supports outside typesetting.

One reason Crunchyroll stood out was that their subtitles and typesetting were clearly better than anything Amazon or Netflix could provide, with neither of them supporting typesetting at all. With Ooona, all of that is gone.

So why has this happened? Funimation. This is effectively the anime industry's Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger. Sure, they kept the Crunchyroll name, but because Funimation had been part of Sony longer, all of Funimation's executives had seniority. As Sony has been cutting staff at Crunchyroll, it's the anime fans at Crunchyroll who knew what they were doing that have been fired, leaving the morons from Funimation who couldn't run a streaming service nor a merch site, in charge.

I have a Crunchyroll sub. I may not for much longer. I'd rather find alternate sources for the few series I watch than put up with the garbage they've been shoveling out as of late.

Heck that doesn't even sound anime-centric. Those features would be great for ALL subtitles across formats. Considering how challenging accurate translation can be, frankly "overnight" translation sounds like a nightmare bound to result in inaccuracies. Why not just have a little patience, give the staff doing translations time to get it right with proper cultural nuance, and get something that'll stand the test of time?

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Probably because the main draw of Crunchyroll is speed. I haven't checked the marketing copy in a while, but for the longest time "simulcast within an hour of original air time!" was one of their biggest selling points. And while the translations aren't great, they've usually been about on-par with the old HorribleSubs releases I used to watch back in college.

At the same time, subs are kind of losing the proverbial battle, since more and more fans want dubs and Amazon is already spearheading the use of AI voice dubs (Banana Fish did not deserve that level of disrespect). I predict that fan subs will probably remain the only way to get culturally nuanced subtitling as more streaming services move towards the Crunchyroll/Amazon methods.

Eh? I thought the U.S. was finally starting to get used to reading subtitles on stuff thanks to the popularity of shows like Squid Games. One thing's for sure, I have NO desire to hear robots dubbing over my foreign language media, and if this is where it's heading count me out.

The same-day stuff is just frightful. I'd rather just wait a month to get higher quality written dialog, and if I must, a year to get better quality dubbing. Then again, I'm very patient when it comes to waiting for certain books to get quality translations. I'm a fan of the Tolkien translation of Beowulf, and that took centuries to come out after the original book's release. It's a quality English-to-English translation. Alright I admit I don't have THAT kind of time but still.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

That's mostly based on my interactions with other anime fans. Lots of them put shows on "in the background" and aren't paying close attention to the screen, so they want the dialog in a language they understand rather than reading subtitles. And at this point, there are some pretty good VAs that manage to deliver good performances, so it's not like the 80s/90s where 99% of dubs were either hilariously bad or "Microsoft Sam on quaaludes".

The latter is just a function of the attention market. Most anime tends to fall into "flavor of the month" and rarely holds attention beyond the primary airing date, so being first to market with something non-JP understanders can digest matters more than ensuring the translations are both highly-accurate and localized.

Huh... while I do listen to some things in the background, it's usually something informational that doesn't need a video context. Listening to a cartoon, namely those known for telling stories visually with a lot of bombastic action, as if it's a radio program seems to defeat the point to me. Like, if I were to watch one of those charming Studio Ghibli movies, they have my full attention start to end. I admit in those cases, I tend to watch with dubs, because Disney has done an amazing job dubbing those with star studded talent.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Wow, it's almost like exactly what we feared would happen when Sony bought it, has actually been happening! Anyone who expected anything less than the lower and free tiers to go away, and costs to just keep climbing, has obviously not been paying attention to the streaming service trends of the last decade... Or of the tendencies and revenue appetites of the big companies that have been assimilating smaller content providing services.

At the end of the day, the populace will opt for alternatives. I give credit to iTunes and it's ilk for finally hitting a price point people were willing to pay to avoid having to search for free songs elsewhere, but TV, movies, and games seem to be running from that. They'll find out what happens.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

I was already irked at the Fan tier losing the ability to download episodes to watch offline and the selection has been dwindling and dwindling, so the experience is being enshitified with an unusual level of multipronged gusto.

It’s been years, but I think CR is getting prime placement in my resist and unsubscribe list.

You will own nothing, and your children won't know what was taken from them. All they need to do is do it long enough for anyone that remembered anything before to die out. I see that with the younger gamer crowd, who have no memory of manipulative business practices in those games, and assume that's normal and nothing else would "work", and have an attitude that a game without constant trickles of costumes or whatever is a "dead game". Even single player games get that pronouncement, where I grew up in a time where I couldn't care less about how many people were playing the game I was playing at the same time I was playing it.