| I have paid subscriptions to the legal streaming services and own a handful of the anime series I watch on DVD/Bluray. I still almost always download releases off of websites - some of which are actually just the legal streaming release repackaged into a form you can watch offline. I'd be happy if the services I paid for gave me a reason not to hit the shady fansub services. Why? * There are specific fansubbing groups that have a well-earned reputation for quality. They consistently do a better job on translation where even major shows will have glaring translation errors on the paid services. Some of these groups even manage to do it quickly. * The video encoding is superior in both size and quality. (Sometimes video quality issues are down to the original broadcast looking awful, due to how HDTV works these days.) * I can download an entire season of a series I've paid to watch, and watch it at my leisure on a laptop or tablet. If I wanted to stream it off Crunchyroll I'd need to have a stable network connection at the time and hope I'm not exceeding my 4G cap (on a mobile device). In practice the streaming players will break, too... * Often the paid services release an episode days or weeks late (to be fair, usually due to negotiated agreements). This is a pain since it's very hard to avoid spoilers from people who watched it day-of in japan or quickly via fansubs. * The viewing experience is better. Most of the paid services still use a flash plugin, which is pretty much a worst-case for watching 24hz video content - judder, tearing, dropped frames, bad upscaling/downscaling, etc. Worse still, the paid services often butcher the color-space and framerate of the video. When you combine all those small mistakes together, it's REALLY distracting to watch an action scene on these services. Sometimes the color-space issues render entire portions of scenes invisible. Aside from a discussion of whether the localization is being done 'right' - dubbing vs subbing, 'literal' translation vs natural translation - occasionally the paid services treat content with respect and I have no reason to use a fansubbed version. Those are great moments, but they're extremely rare. The last time I can remember this happening was the (FYI, pretty gross) series Kill la Kill, where the translation was supposedly provided by someone hired by the animation studio. There were no errors in translation, the script felt natural, and the video was good. Those occasional successes are part of why I still pay for the services I rarely use. FWIW the manga industry has this same problem, but far worse. It's a miracle official English localizations of manga sell at all. Every company in that chain seems to be inept or actively taking steps to hinder their sales. Manga piracy is an actual business online, unfortunately, where anime piracy is more of a casual thing - there are dozens of websites out there that make money running ads on pirated manga. Naturally, the pirated manga usually ranks #1 on Google. |