[PebblesHD]

I’ve posted before about my half-in half-out life between Japan and Australia, and the media I consume is a product of this. Anime, while not a massive part of my watching habit, is certainly a weekly thing at least, and over the past few years it’s been getting harder and harder to support legal services outside of Japan.

In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc.

They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’.

I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.

[silicon5]

The Crunchyroll/Funimation merger was a really bad deal for fans, in that a huge number of series were never ported over to Crunchyroll before the Funimation shutdown.

Initially, the two had a deal where Funimation would allow subtitle-only versions of series to appear on Crunchyroll, while Funimation would focus on the dub audience. In November 2018 some corporate hijinks happened, and the alliance was considered no longer viable. Funi pulled about 240 series from Crunchyroll, amounting to nearly 20% of Crunchyroll's library at the time.

When the merger happened in 2024, Funimation's shutdown FAQ implied that Funimation's content would be available on Crunchyroll, and even encouraged users to cancel their Funimation subscription and subscribe to Crunchyroll going forward. However, there are still some 182 series which never made it back to Crunchyroll, even though they had been there before. There are just a bunch of anime that aren't legitimately available on any streaming service any more.

[zdw]

The funny thing about this narrative is that Crunchyroll also started out as an "informal distribution" pirate site, and had all the good things you mentioned beat out of them by successive acquisitions and corporate ownership.

[SllX]

They’re still just within the threshold of good enough, but I was pretty annoyed the day comments disappeared. It might have been young viewers, but I was a young viewer once and those comments went back all the way to that time. It was also one thing Crunchyroll had that other streaming sites typically don’t (except YouTube of course): community.

[bavell]

CR removing comments removed the soul from the product :/

Was always fun reading the top comments on big episodes. Finding those few other ppl who noticed that one small thing at timestamp 14:30, dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai... etc

[Tor3]

Yes, that the comments disappeared was terrible. Some comment would have early and precious information in some cases, e.g. the existence of a direct precursor (not part of the list of 'seasons'), and tons of other information, not just comments about characters in the show or whatever. And reviews don't have comments either, I miss those. Would have saved wasted time.

[SllX]

Yep!

> dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai

I was literally reaching to see if somebody else had already made a lame-ass “Truck-kun” joke on the first episode of No Longer Allowed in Another World or if I was going to have to provide a fill when I saw the change.

[vunderba]

It's a shame but understandable from a business perspective since they had to have a moderation team to support some of the less savory comments juvenile users were leaving.

[SllX]

No, it’s not understandable because Crunchyroll has spent the majority of its time as a streaming service as a commercial paid or free-with-ads service that has a community, with comments under every video up until like last year. Moderation is an expense, but it’s 1) not an unreasonable one, especially given the scale of Crunchyroll and a paid subscriber base and 2) some investment in automating moderation or developing tools for their moderators can reduce the cost of maintaining moderation.

It was a deliberate choice that removed some of the value of the service and wiped out yet another swath of Internet history. The core is of course the videos, they can coast on that for a while, but it’s the changes like that add up that make Crunchyroll less competitive going forward, especially as other larger services acquire larger anime libraries.

[Tor3]

The problem is that '.. make Crunchyroll less competitive..' isn't really happening. There is no competition. Even when there are multiple providers (say, Netflix in addition to Crunchyroll), a particular show, or even season, will be licensed to exactly one of them, in any particular region. There was a particular show where I had to juggle between CR and N for every season because CR and N couldn't both license all the seasons.

And.. it's actually better if absolutely everything is on Crunchyroll. One subscription and you're set. Or I am, at least. Having to hunt around to figure out where some particular show can be found.. subscribe there only for watching that particular one.. mostly it can't be done, in my region, and I absolutely don't want to.

Which of course also gives CR no competition, and that's the price we pay. When the quality has gone down enough, the alternative isn't moving to a competitor, it's to give up on anime altogether.

Plan B is of course to get my Japanese up to a level sufficient to be able to turn off the subs, at least any potential problem there will be gone.

I pay much less for CR than for Netflix, I would rather pay more on Crunchyroll if this could guarantee a certain quality. Netflix, on the other hand, is basically a giant waste of money for me. That I haven't cancelled yet is just lazyness.

[vunderba]

Shrugs. I don't know what to tell you. I'm glad to see that you're passionate about it I guess but most of my friends who use Crunchyroll were also equally unsurprised when they removed the comment section. I can't think of any streaming services that have something like that - as I said before, there's literally no upside to it for CR. Those comment sections could also be a puerile cesspool.

I'm sure there was an extremely vocal minority that threw a fit when they killed it off, but I doubt their overall subscriber numbers were significantly impacted. The majority of people are just there to watch anime. There's plenty of subreddits that are vastly more suitable to discussion.

Calling the Crunchyroll anime comment section a community is a bit of a stretch, it's like saying that the comments under a TikTok video are a community.

My original point stands.

[ehnto]

A brand is built on sentiment. That's the upside. You are witnessing exactly why it's important here, as people tell you why they're going to stop being customers. I don't watch anime so have no skin in this game, but this is a classic tale at this point.

A company gets successful off the back of community engagement and builds great shared sentiment with its customers. They get bought, the incoming board members start cutting costs, accidentally cutting the artery they didn't realise fed the heart of the brand.

The company loses an edge the board didn't realise it had, and people slowly lose that connection, which allows them to painlessly jump ship to the next company with the same catalog but better sentiment brand.

[csin]

"Calling the Crunchyroll anime comment section a community is a bit of a stretch, it's like saying that the comments under a TikTok video are a community."

Am I missing something here? (I don't use TikTok).

- The comment section under a youtube video is a community.

- The comments on the side of Instagram pictures is a community.

- Twitch chat is a community.

- Even Imgur has a community. I'm surprised that's a thing, but they do.

[chownie]

For the most part this HN community is comments bolted on to content from different websites, we call this a community with no issues. I don't think it's a stretch.

[ToucanLoucan]

Corporate consolidation ruins products left and right. I wish we had a functioning regulatory body.

[kbolino]

I'd rather have one good streaming service with everything on it than the dozens of crappy streaming services with their ever-shifting patchwork of available licensed content we have now. Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.

[PebblesHD]

Challenge is we ended up with one really bad streaming service but lots of capital slurping up all the licenses. In my ideal world, the regulator would prevent using exclusivity as a moat to prevent smaller operations competing.

Australia is a tiny market but before the big american companies bought them out, our local AnimeLab offering was one of the worlds best. If a new similarly oriented offering could launch and compete I’d love to see it, but sadly only pirate operations can do so, and are doing so effectively.

[redwall_hp]

There's a reason it was law in the US that movie production companies couldn't own movie theaters: distribution should be required to be separate to ensure choice on the viewer side due to the inherent non-fungibility of entertainment media. In other words, if through copyright we grant a monopoly, then it's not a sustainable situation for the distribution to also be allowed to consolidate.

[lotsofpulp]

The solution to this is copyright only lasting for 10 years.

[mkozlows]

And what makes the one streaming service stay good, with no competitors?

[kbolino]

Ideally we'd have both benefits: many platforms each with (more or less) all the content, where they compete on consumer-focused streaming features rather than on their (transient) licensed content libraries. But right now we have plenty of "competition" yet it's all just a race to the bottom.

[kalleboo]

> many platforms each with (more or less) all the content

Which is what we have on the music side of things. You can choose Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music etc based on how their service works for you rather than what music you want to listen to.

[ToucanLoucan]

Worth noting though, those monoliths themselves come with tradeoffs; artists don't earn shit for streaming, which is why the only way to really "support" one anymore is concerts and merch.

And don't get me wrong I love concerts and merch, but I'd rather people earn a reasonable living without needing to be on tour basically in perpetuity.

[chii]

> Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.

completely agree - i think the gov't regulatory body should change the landscape to what film and cinema have; such that distributor of media cannot own and monopolize the broadcast rights on their own platform, and publisher of media be forced to sell/license at the same price to all distributors.

This way, a streaming service can always know and pay for a broadcasting license for _any_ media, and all media must be license-able for any streaming service (at the same price), thus no monopoly can exist under this system.

[zdw]

I tend to agree with this take - look at the book or music industry, where you can buy most media in each category on most platforms, with some exceptions.

Ideally, like music, we'd get multiple vendors offering downloads that are high quality copy of video that isn't DRM encumbered.

But currently, we don't get this, and the closest legitimate way (modulo the DMCA...) to get video as a file is to buy physical media and rip it.

Serious shades of Gabe Newell's "it's a service problem, not a pricing problem" around all of this.

[pjc50]

Just imagine what the British regulatory body OFCOM would do with anime.

[echelon]

It might take a few more decades, but Google will ultimately win the streaming wars.

I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.

You can also interpret that as I'll be shocked if AI doesn't result in every mangaka becoming their own small studio and distributing via YouTube.

[axpy906]

> I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.

In 2002 it was and I really liked it then.

[zdw]

YouTube was founded in 2005, is this a typo?

[lanyard-textile]

I think you’re right for certain use cases. When I want to watch a specific movie, you can pull it up and rent it super easy on YouTube.

No fuss. It’s basically a 1-click operation. $2.99 or whatever to watch your movie in good quality.

[Hamuko]

There are some anime that are simulcast on YouTube. Watanare was one of them during the summer 2025 season.

https://youtu.be/wyyXL__Awlk

[anigbrowl]

I'll be shocked if they're able to get noticed above the tide of slop and industrially automated bogus copyright claims.

[echelon]

Discovery has always been a problem.

You can look to the past to see what this might look like in the future:

- Publishing in the digital publishing era.

- Indie Gaming in the Steam Greenlight era.

- Indie music in the digital recording / DAW era.

- Trying to make it as an actor or musician in general.

- YouTuber careers vs. "YouTube poop"

- Trying to make it as a streamer / influencer

Novelty, self-promo, luck, preparation, right place/right time, likeability -- there are lots of things that can come together to make it work. But it's still a lot of work.