An epic battle
Scamp and I disagree about just about everything anime-related. While we watch many of the same series, sometimes blog about similar topics and generally get along, this fact remains. These disagreements have brought out a lot of thinking on both sides, and now we harness these differing viewpoints to begin what we hope to be a semi-regular series of debates taking place alternatingly on THAT and The Cart Driver. These debates will put forth a motion where one blogger defends and the other opposes it, with a shorter second round of counterpoints and finally a poll at the end where the readers vote for which argument they found more convincing. As you might have noticed, this format is similar to the Oxford debating style in many ways, though changed slightly to help it fit the blog format.
The first motion up for debate is: Professional streaming sites like Crunchyroll are the future of online anime.
Scamp will be defending the motion, while I will argue that downloaded fansubbed anime will continue to be the dominant form of anime online. Join us, consider both arguments, and cast your vote!
Opening round: position statements
Defending the motion: Scamp, blogger and owner of TheCartDriver.
First let me make this clear: There is currently a whole load of problems with legal anime streams. Dodgy subs, poor media players and those accursed region restrictions that plague most legal streams. But these are all technical issues, things that can be cleared up given time, funding and plenty of people complaining about these problems. No, what I am here to defend is the inherent idea behind legal anime streaming.
Think back to the many nonsensical reasons people used to justify watching fansubs. One of the favourites the ANNfags used to love tearing into was the idea that the Japanese got anime free on their television so why shouldn’t we. The ANNfags would be quick to point out that television isn’t free and so on, but what we have now is effectively the same thing. We are getting the same anime that is airing in Japan on the same day. We are getting a television channel devoted to anime, with not only the anime that is airing right now but a huge backlog of previously aired anime. This is none of your Adult Swim rubbish; this is aimed directly at us fansub watchers. They are providing exactly what we have been craving for since day 1: Simultaneous airing of anime for the rest of the world.
Let me also settle a few things here. Why do we watch fansubs? Because they are free and there’s often no other way to watch these anime. I watch licensed anime on those shady streaming sites because I absolutely refuse to buy a series blind. If I like it, then I’ll buy the series. Well, nowadays companies are providing legal streams of their products as they release them, so the need to go on these shady streaming sites is gradually being eroded away.
But more importantly, let me look at why people download anime that’s on Crunchyroll. They don’t want to pay the membership fee (an absolute bargain price BTW, but that’s beside the point) and claim they will buy the series when it is licensed. Well, little wakeup call here, but that does count as being licensed. Each season the Western licensing companies get a look at each show coming up and decide whether they’re worth picking up themselves. Essentially, what doesn’t get picked up by Funimation and Bandai sinks down and ends up on Crunchyroll. There’s a few exceptions to this rule where CR really bend over backwards to try get the show, such as Fairy Tail and Durarara, but for the most part that is the only way you will be able to watch these anime legally beyond actually buying the Japanese DVD’s.
One hugely important factor that legal streams have over fansubbers is that they are under direct control of the anime companies themselves. They are getting the facts and figures about our viewing preferences. Read the gg interview with the Crunchyroll subber for a full view of how things are behind the scenes but the most interesting part of that interview is the fact that the money that goes companies get paid is based upon the how many people watch that show. To quote the guy from the interview:
“CR’s business model is a hybrid subscription/ad-based revenue share. Let’s take the subscriber part first. All that money goes into a pot. The total number of minutes spent watching each show by subscribers is calculated. So “Naruto 312 has a total of 123456 subscriber minutes in Q2″ or whatever and the pot of money is split up to the various different Japanese companies in proportion. Then CR takes its cut (which varies with each contract, obviously) and the Japanese get the rest. The ad-based model is more usual: Total ad revenue is reported to CR by the ad-serving company for each video… It’s added up and split up based on the ad-based revenue split (which is often different than the subscriber one). The good news with this is that people who subscribe and like, JUST watch Naruto can be happy knowing that all their money ends up going to the people that make Naruto”
Fansub popularity has had an indirect result on what gets licensed, nobody can deny that. But here we have an important change. What we watch in the rest of the world finally is having a direct economic impact on the actual anime companies. We all watch Durarara and Sora no Woto, those companies get money and make more of the same. Nobody watches Chu-bra and the companies get no money from us. Finally we will have a direct say in what anime we want to watch. Instead of companies aiming specifically at Japanese Otaku, they will now start to think of what the rest of the world want to watch on their legal streams.
Yes this is a bit of a fanciful dream and legal streams certainly aren’t at that level yet. But read the motion being put forward. This is the future for anime on the internet. Anime companies are finally realising what we want and we are spending our money on exactly what we want.
Scamp can see to the starry future of anime.
Opposing the motion: ExecutiveOtaku, blogger at T.H.A.T. Animeblog.
The variety, quality, and availability of fansubs, together with the nature of the community, will ensure that they will continue to be the dominant source of anime. Downloading fansubbed anime offers the above advantages of variety and quality due to the diverse nature of the people and groups who do the subbing. Different points of view and word choices for the translation allow viewers to choose their preferred format. They are easily available around the world and in many languages as well. And furthermore, members of the community take great pride in their work and often devote much of their time to serving their fellow fans, and in the process also get translation and editing practice. Finally, fansubs will always enjoy the advantage of being free of cost, as well as some inherent technological and convenience advantages.
Variety and diversity is to me the biggest advantage of downloading and watching fansubbed anime. Translating any language is never an exact science, and especially for a language like Japanese there is rarely a 100% perfect ‘this=that’ translation.The variety of fansubbing groups allows users to select translation that they prefer: literal or ‘adapted’ translations, translation notes or none, plain names or the use of suffixes. And the abundance of fansubbing groups also means that even obscure series get translated and released. The competition between all these groups to be the first to release or the group with the best subtitle style also promotes the quality of fansubs, a competition that is lacking in professional releases. On a more humorous note, would professionally run streaming sites include such classic jokes and references as [gg]’s ‘subtitle’ of “everything is FABULOUS” in the Code Geass R2 ep 15 opening? I think not. Needless to say, this creates a lot of fan loyalty and sense of community among both those who translate and those who watch.
Aside from variety, there are other major advantages to fansubs. The first is the one that generates plenty of internet drama/controversy, so I’ll get right to it: fansubs are free. Free is sometimes ambiguously legal as with series that aren’t licensed in one’s home country, sometimes they’re just plainly illegal licensed series. But let’s be honest, the vast majority of us don’t care. We are a generation that is used to being able to download all kinds of media freely and share, alter, archive, and watch it at our convenience. This is not to say that we fans do not send money into the anime industry; we are by and large pretty voracious consumers of ‘secondary’ products such as figures, model kits, cosplay items, creepy daimakura, etc. Not to mention buying DVDs that we have judged worth our money by watching fansubs. Secondly, there has never been, and I believe never will be, an effective deterrent to file sharing. I was there, at the dawn of time when Napster was brand new. Over the years I have seen media owners attempt to sue downloaders, only to have the sharing technology move on to more and more capable ways of keeping downloaders from getting caught.
One more advantage is that streaming, by its nature, requires an open internet connection. Certainly broadband is becoming more widespread, but one can not be online in all places at all times with a good and stable connection. Regional issues are another big problem at present with streaming sites, since they embrace legality and are thus bound by its territorial restrictions. This brings up a secondary point: downloading allows you to get what you want no matter where you are. Sometimes this allows one to get around nonsensical legal issues. But it could potentially have other ramifications. What if you’re in a country with rather non-progressive civil liberties laws? The Nazi enemies in Hellsing could in theory run afoul of Germany’s restrictive laws. And I imagine one may run into some difficulty trying to legally obtain Dance in the Vampire Bund in a country with elements of Sharia or other religious laws (or in Australia, which seems to be heading towards some sort of secular Sharia lately under the mantra of ‘protect the children.’ Please, won’t someone think of the lolicons!?.)
In conclusion, fansubs enjoy far too many advantages in fan loyalty, cost, storage/sharing, accessibility, variety, quality, and diversity to be supplanted by streaming sites. While streaming sites like CrunchyRoll will attract some fans to their services for a variety of reasons, this will not be the future trend in the community. If anything the growth of broadband worldwide and interest in studying the Japanese language and in watching anime has only increased the amount of fansubbers, fansub groups, and fansub distribution sites. As file sharing continues to evolve, collaboration on translations and the distribution of high quality fansubbed anime to fans will only become easier.
EO thinks fansubs are absolutely fabulous.
Short Responses
Scamp
One thing many of the more experienced anime fans forget is that most of the newer generation of anime fans are already watching streams, just not legal ones. Therefore the change to legal streams is far more convenient than most people seem to realise. The advantages of downloaded fansubs are not something these fans are looking for. So this idea of a greater community is a myth. How many outside the insular community of fansub followers will get the FABULOUS joke? I would prefer the reliability of a legal company without in-jokes to a fansub group who might drop the show halfway through. Plus not caring is not a problem because legal streams is the way to watch any anime. No hunting through torrent sites for a legitimate sub or trawling through shady streaming sites for the latest episode on a video that hasn’t been taken down already. Legal streams with adverts do not cost money and it’s not like having adverts is a whole lot different to what we watch now when you consider gg have a habit of leaving in adverts anyway. Legal streams are and will be the easiest and most reliable way of getting the latest anime.
Region restrictions though, there is no counterargument for and I shall curse them until I die.
The aforementioned legal disputes over international streaming.
ExecutiveOtaku
My counterpart’s argument seems to rest on three main points: that professional streaming sites are superior because they are always legal, that they will reach a level of technical quality so as to level that playing field, and that by using professional streaming sites the rest of the world will be able to influence what anime is produced based on what sells. On the first point, I believe my initial argument still stands: that most of us don’t care and that there is no effective deterrent to make us care. On the second, I do expect professional streaming sites to reach a level of quality on par with fansubs. However, this does not undo the other technical advantages of fansubs, namely the actual possession of the files and the variety of translation styles available due to the multitude of fansub groups. On his third point, despite the massive growth of anime worldwide I do not foresee it growing to a point where it supplants the domestic demands for certain kinds of shows. Hollywood movies make billions of dollars around the world, but have they changed to reflect global tastes? While the idea of having international demand shape some of what is produced is very appealing, due to the unwavering demand in Japan and the often insular or even xenophobic attitudes of Japanese companies (and some fans if 2chan is any indicator), I would not bet on international demand shaping series creation decisions in the future.
Goooooo fansubs!
The Vote
A word from EO on voting: please read both arguments and consider the motion being proposed. This is not a vote for your personal preference of how to watch anime, this is a debate and a vote on which form of online anime will be the dominant form in the future. As far as what ‘the future’ means, think in terms of the next 10 years or so. ‘Dominant’ meaning which will be how the large majority of anime fans choose to access their anime. Also, elaborating on which argument you found more convincing, as well as putting forth your own argument in the comments, is encouraged. Have fun!
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.
38 Comments
Meh, I like that CR dubs Gintama faster than Rumbel.
I mean, if they’d just put up higher quality episodes without making people pay money, that’d be golden.
I miss the old CR actually. >___> It was like an asian youtube.
The money part really is the critical point in most cases. I never really used CR back before it went pay, but I imagine that it sucked for regular users when it did.
As someone who’s watched lots of downloaded shows (and a bunch on CR too), I’ll just chime in with my thoughts on the issue.
Legal is better, for the most part. If you can get something legally, it’s usually the better option to do so, and since around now I usually end up a week or so behind on watching things, the “free” shows on CR are fine with me.
Problems with CR: Considering that I have a very, very limited grasp of Japanese, as long as I’m able to pick out errors in CR subs, I’d consider them fairly low-level. Second, the fact that the videos are only available online sucks. I understand that if they were downloadable, people would d/l them, then torrent them everywhere, but really, that’s happening already. Horriblesubs was the first (I think), then other groups did it too. For some shows that I really like, I’ll watch it on CR, but d/l a “hard” copy for myself as well, so that I can watch them when I’m offline, as well. The third issue I have with CRsubs is pretty minor, but the lack of Op/Ed subtitles just irks me.
If the legal sites can bring their subs up to par with the fansubbers (possible), as well as the extra things like subbed Op/Eds, (or even just a standalone Op/Ed with subs and leaving the main ones clean), sure, I can see a trend toward the legal sites. As long as they ask you to pay for sub-fansubbed work, though, I can’t see it being a major force in the area.
And then, of course, there is the simple fact that lots of series don’t get legally subbed. For those, you still need the fansubbers.
PS: For the cases like ExecutiveOtaku mentioned, where shows would be banned by local law, or whatever, the whole case above goes out the window. If you want to watch it, and it’s not available legally, fansubs are the only way (literally) to go.
CR is the future, but only because as far as I’m aware, as it is now streaming audiences outnumber Bittorrenters and Filesharers by a very large margin, and I don’t see it changing. However I think Fansubs will always be the place for niche stuff.
I know that there are a large number of people who watch non-anime TV shows streamed, but no idea on the exact numbers. Do you know of any sources or surveys on the numbers? I’d be really interested to find out. Though tracking numbers of bittorrent users might be difficult.
I hardly use CR,
*re-phrase* i never use CR, so i dont really think its the futur unless something terrible happens..
there are tons of streaming site thought.
Oi, the world is not black and white: it`s gray.
) but we haven`t reached the teenage phase of it yet.
We will have both due to the facts you presented.
The restrictions will stay here in Europe for the next 10 years unless the European Parliament is able to make a Copyright Law, all the nations have to follow. But since the copyright debate started some years ago, every nation is going its own way and these really differ.
Additionally Germans don`t use credit cards. How should I pay these international pages, especially when underage?
I would prefer it, when these companies start a platform on their own with international donation possibilities. You can even extend this to a platform dedicated to every area of stuff, which isn`t available in other countries.
Then they ask the fans to include the respective donation link to the company on their homepage. Additionally they can invest in the streaming sites to access large areas but in the next 20 years they won`t be able to reach every fan.
Since we are fans, who don`t mind paying a bit: allow me to get the anime/ manga half – legally and provide a donation possibility, which is consistent with my home country`s laws.
Hopefully this will give enough money to the companies so they step down on suing (?) everybody and move to a relaxed behaviour.
The German television actually forces me to watch American /Anime series in dupped German ^^ and sometimes, this is the worst. We are already switching to on-demand service (we have (high – speed) broadband in most of Germany
The credit cards/debit cards issue is something I was not aware of, but I can imagine the problems that would cause you if you don’t have one, for CR and for almost all transactions online.
Haha, oh dubbed anime. Apparently it’s not just the scourge of English-speaking anime fans.
Well it was quite amusing to watch the first season of Sailor Moon (oh yeah ..) in Jap + Engl sub, Engl Dub, German Dub. It was hilarious.
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I wasn`t able to find a French version
In this serial they even changed some names and made the gender of some of the girls unclear to make it fit into the different cultures. In my eyes, that can be seen as a piece of art
German television/cinema dubb everything ^^. You have to check the cinema plan to find the “Original” Version somewhere in your area. And the animes are dubbed the worst because of low budget.
We use debit cards: Maestro especially Girocards and when you`ve started working on a regular basis, you can add a creditcard to your bank card but most of us never need that unless they travel outside of Europe.
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As you can see, this is quite normal here since the seller has no additional fees from the credit card firm but we make a “payment via a direct debit” … that`s what my dictionary says.. with some interesting additional features included.
And well: we pay in cash and we use coins! .. some Americans had to buy new wallets when they arrived here
As long the country restrictions exist there is no way CR will peek my interest. Paying for a legal service and not being able to watch the shows is stupid.
So ill stick to the fansubs and free streaming sites until the copyrights gets rewritten.
Well I woul’ve said that cr is the future of online anime but i can’t watch almost all of their series because of region restrictions. This is the reason why fansubs are there. Its available just like that and if it wasn’t ther, i wouldn’t have watched a lot of the animes that ive watched. Besides I think fansubs is like pirated dvds. Its bad but can you stop it?
I feel that online legal streams will eventually become the main way to watch especially after the region lock issues are fixed, there may even be an opportunity to legally download as well.
Fansubs will most likely always be around as it is likely that shows won’t get released with subs since they just won’t be considered popular enough or something.
On the flip side of this is Kadokawa recognizing fansubs and their audience as an indicator of the intenational market. They did not expect The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi to be an Internet phenomenon. Something that they did intend to market outside Japan became a hit that licensee’s came to them for the opportunity.
Sure TV Tokyo is paying CR but in the end it is another marketing strategy.
I’m not saying one is superior over the other but in the end which is the better marketing strategy? Meaning in the end Blu-Rays and DVDs got to sell.
A combination of both is valid. At least until licensing comes in.
For CR it is work. Sometimes mistranslations do happen. Like when Ja became No in Sora no Woto. Even non-Germans know Ja means Yes. Fansubbers does it out of love of the genre and occasionally bragging rights. Makes them work harder. Fansubbers makes this disclaimer that if you’ve bought this fansub you got dupped. Because a fansub is for free. At least with licensed anime you know you are paying somebody legally. Also I have to question if CR is popular enough. There are other streaming sites that features fansubs. Something CR used to do.
On a related note scanlation circles encourage the readers to buy the manga volumes so the mangaka and his staff get their due. Same can applied to Fansubs as a viral marketing tool.
There are extraordinary cases that it is licensing hell that the best way to market them internationally is allowing fansubs to happen. Case in point Macross Frontier. Harmony Gold holds the Macross trademark in the US but the real Copyright owner is Big West. For the moment Big West don’t see North America as a viable market. Placing their marketing energy locally in Japan. Fortunately there is the Internet that by word of mouth that Macross Frontier becomes popular internationally. K-Ching! Blu-Rays and DVDs are ordered and sold without even needing to be licensed.
Well, legal streaming will never totally replace fansubs, but sites like CR can grow and become stable (by which I mean they will gather a bigger community and followingly more money, followingly putting up more anime each season). Fansubs being free though, there still will be enough people who don’t have money for CR or whatever reason they will use.
I have been trying to propose this for the past 2 years, but either I phrased it badly or something, nobody supported. So, just as a thought here — If one of the biggest problem between fansubs and legal streams are the subs, then I propose the following: Legal streaming sites should hire fansubbing groups (and give them freedom of TL notes and thatalike). So for example, instead of releasing the new Durarara episode through torrents, BSS would release it to CR, who would put it up. This thought is extendable, they could hire more fansubbing groups and as the new sub formats (.mkv) are soft-subs, you could choose what subbing group you’d like to see in a video. As far as it doesn’t touch the money question it is a solution of the ‘variety’ and the ‘quality’, don’t you think?
Hm well, the problems are not the subs but the raws.
Scanning/recording and distributing manga/ anime is prohibited for everyone without the licence.
Streaming pages don`t have the licence to distribute the episode at the moment because these are not given to them. The streaming rights are given to the television stations or to the streaming site with IP restrictions to not disturb the market of the television firms in other countries.
The firms have to licence the anime for every language they want to sub/dub it. As long as the don`t do it, watching subbed anime is free of problems. The copyright violators are the raw providers so the problems aren`t the subs but the raws.
Fansubber groups are international groups, with frequently changing helpers. This means you have to pay them in an international way and always according to the local law afaik.
It`s too much work to use these groups.
Also the raw providers of the last years have to stay hidden to protect themselves against the copyright lawyers… .
And isn`t there a “submit your own sub” – button on some sides? You could actually do that and add your own / favourite sub to the video.
I think for the near future, fansubs will still be dominant, but that legal streams like CR have the potential to become dominant provided that they iron out the few kinks, which EO mentioned in this debate. The main reason is that, since most anime fans are used to getting things immediately AND for free. With the CR simultcasts, you have to pay in order to get series released as quickly as possible. Not until it is by far and large easier (and free) to watch things instantly as they air in Japan, will a more drastic shift from fansubs to legal streams happen, because right now, like EO said, there’s not enough incentive for fansub viewers to switch over to legal streams other than a conscience. It’s sad, but true.
I do disagree somewhat with EO about the growing interest in the Japanese language leading to more and more fansub groups as time goes on. Provided that legal streaming sites could actually pay these talented translators, typesetters, timers, etc. that could potentially skew the entire argument in favor of the streaming sites, giving them the better quality product.
Lastly, I’m surprised neither of you mentioned ‘fansub’ groups that just rip the fansubs directly off of CR and distribute them as soon as possible through torrents. I’m not sure if there’s any way to stop this from happening, and if it continues, it could mean that legal streams may never be able to catch up.
Anyway, great debate! I’m looking forward to the next one.
The idea of hiring the fansubbers to work for legal sites might get some people onboard, but I don’t think it would get most people. For one fansubbers would be tied to actual deadlines and potentially not have control over what they are tasked with fansubbing. That lack of motivation might deter some and lead to laziness in the ones who do go professional. In fansubbing it seems that there’s a similar Do It Yourself (DIY) mentality as there is in the punk music community and other music scenes. I think the idea of giving up the freedom to fansub how and when a translator wants might be antithetical to the sensibilities of many fansubbers.
The people that rip from CR and distribute are not well regarded by myself, to put it nicely. It’s the same as stealing another fansub group’s work and passing it off as your own. I know it might seem contradictory to some (Scamp for example) that I’m fine with taking the media but I get annoyed by people stealing subs, but it’s kind of an honor thing. To me it’s akin to saying that you created the work yourself when in fact someone else did the work to make it.
Nothing wrong with buying closest to the source (that’s where your vote will count most).
I’m surprised PS3 was not mentioned here. :<
Anyhow, I'd be more willing to see the committees themselves start working contracts for their own distribution models, and not sending a cut to the middle-men. Personally, stream quality is not somethin I like (I watch no more than 5 youtube videos a month, that is how much I enjoy streams), and CR is not at the level to up the quality without breaking it's back (they are not Hulu, who I also don't watch). Stream currently run on Flash, another big fail imo.
Lastly, I would take Japanese television over streams anyday.
Stream quality is a huge reason why I don’t watch them. I’m not obsessed with having perfect BD quality resolution or anything, but streamed stuff is just horrible to my eyes. I have an HDTV and monitor for a reason!
I’m a proud owner of a PS3, but I only use it to play stuff from my computer onto my TV via PS3 Media Server. It could be another outlet for streaming (Xamd for example), but I haven’t seen it being much different from PC streaming.
When I contemplate The Future, I consider what will be the next avenue that mainstream crowds will visit for their entertainment fix. In our little circle of blogger readin’&writin’ friends, fansubs will always be our first choice (I think). But we’re at the cutting edge of technology sharing and internet savvy, a niche community “in the know”, and we have a somewhat inflated opinion of our pull on the industry. The Future rests upon the collective shoulders of the casual community of anime fans, who (I imagine) would prefer the ease of a one-stop hub and access to instantly streaming video like Crunchyroll.
The anime boom in the west wasn’t due to the tape trading otaku community of the last generation, but from Pokemon and anime blocks hitting prime-time TV airwaves. That’s what Crunchyroll can be: the Toonami block of this generation where the masses of casual viewers can find their new favorite entertainment. In that way, the future is already here, the question now is how do companies like Crunchyroll monetize and stabilize this system.
Excellent point, seeing legal streaming as the next Toonami. Though with people growing up with a very capable internet, I think the chances of them not knowing that they could just download or illegally stream stuff for free is pretty low. Still, I think you might be on to something, even if it doesn’t hook a majority of anime fans it might be useful for casual ones.
If CR boosts the quality of the services they offer I think they will indeed become the dominant source of online anime especially for those of the foreign market or at least a similar company. Due to the sheer number of shady streaming sites I would make a guess that a fair amount of viewers get their anime fix from such sites. So if one site upped their quality greater than the other I would not doubt a large shift toward crunchyroll or an equivalent site. I think it demonstrated pretty handily when crunchyroll went from being the “asian youtube” as an above commenter stated, to being the organized venue that we see today. The forums gained more activity as well as the recognition from the animation companies themselves.
I do think however that there will still be a fair number of fans who choose to fansub and download fansubs. Unless the streaming sites start producing free 1080p and BD streams of the shows I doubt fansubbing will ever die out. Some people just can’t stand to watch their anime in less than exemplary format. Gurren Lagann was the first anime I watched after downloading instead of streaming which; I felt, did not do the show justice. So I can empathize with those who want to watch quality. What I want is more sites that re-encode for xvid/mp3 for us shitty old computer folks.
I also think their are fans who would be interested in supporting the industry but lack either the funds or the awareness to do so. If watching more on CR helps make more and (hopefully) better anime I am all for it…as soon as they clean up their streams. I do however agree with EO that the thought of the companies attempting to cater to an international audience is just rubbish. The majority of their viewers and dvd buyers will still be in japan and we all know it’s the dvd sales that make the biggest buck for them.
I have one BIG problem with professional streaming sites, I live in Mexico, for some weird reason my country is somewhere in the limbo of being USA for the internet without actually having any stuff from there, that means, if USA is blocked from broadcasting any streams, so is Mexico and that’s completely unfair.
I prefer to have access to all anime I might like to check instead of depending on how much and which series USA picks, Mexico is not USA and we have little to no licensed anime or even companies willing to buy licenses, people would say “hey, but you damage the industry if you don’t buy it”, then I can say, if my country is not even existent on those who sell, then where is the loss? they were not planning to sell it to us anyway…
I pay my quarterly CR subscription, but I’m struggling to recall when I last watched anything on the site. I hate streaming with an unholy passion, for shows that CR cover I download the rips or a fansubbed alternative, because I prefer to watch my anime without having to wait for it to buffer and the picture quality is just better.
Unless the quality of streaming vastly improves – both in terms of technical quality and the quality of the subs, and the issue of region locking and unstable broadband connections is solved, I can’t see the rank and file of anime fans making the move to legal streams over their fabulous free fansubs.
I despise streaming video as well for a variety of reasons, but I do watch stuff on CR. What I’ve actually ended up doing recently is downloading a fansub to watch, and then playing the CR feed in some background tab to let them know I watched it and send whatever my view’s worth of money is back to the creators.
Obviously fansubs will never die. Region restrictions alone prevent that, and even without that not every series is going to be available from official sources.
On the other hand, YouTube has certainly shown that most people in the world have extremely low quality threshhold requirements. CR’s quality is actually pretty good; if they could get their bandwidth issues dealt with there’s nothing on the technical side that could be considered a serious bottleneck, even if some people would prefer to have their 1080p video.
In the end, they’ll coexist to serve different purposes.
Advantages of fansubs:
No region restrictions
Offline use (including playback on different systems, such as home theater equipment)
Video quality (for now)
Advantages of official streaming:
Legal
Money supports the creators of the shows you watch
Convenience (for a certain level of convenience; mainly, “little technical knowledge needed”, and “full library easily and quickly accessible”)
Some would argue ‘cost’ as a factor, however ‘cost’ is usually defined in the arguer’s favor as a single element of all potential contributing factors. Is cost in money? Time? Convenience? Ease of use? Format shifting? Does money count bandwidth, for those with restricted or metered bandwidths? Etc.
There is also translation quality, however that is usually subjective. Mistakes in one camp are noted as major, while ignoring the mitakes in the other. As far as I know, there has never been a comprehensive objective study on the quality and accuracy of translations among the two groups.
Everything aside from that is personal preference. Pretty much all remaining arguments in the ‘debate’ are pure unsubstantiated rhetoric. Heck, even the motion being debated is vague. What is “the future of anime” supposed to mean? It’s ambiguous enough that they’re not even arguing against each other, they’re arguing about what their own vision of “the future of anime” is.
There’s a technical term for that, but I can’t recall offhand. It’s like a soap commercial telling you that their brand gives you “a better feeling of freshness”. Better than what? And what exactly is a ‘feeling of freshness’? You pretend that you’ve made a point, but all you’ve done is make the audience think you’ve made a point while not actually saying anything at all.
Your point about YouTube is a good one, though I would argue that it is popular in its current form because of the nature of most of what is provided on it. Most of its content is short videos or fan/amateur-made videos, things that don’t require great visual quality. But when people sit down to watch an episode of something or a movie via streaming, at least the people I know usually go elsewhere.
The first part of the debate stated what we believe the future will look like, followed by the responses where we directly challenged each other’s positions. While it may not be a back and forth verbal debate, it is a debate nonetheless. We argued cases for what we believe the future of online anime will be, used some examples, argued the logic of what we believe the outcome will be, and set those arguments before the readers for a vote. The motion is speculative and therefore can not be exactly defined, but if you look at the instructions before the vote we did narrow down the timeframe and key concept. It’s not some completely amorphous concept like “freshness”, it’s about which of the two forms will be the majority form.
@ YouTube: Google has something in the pipeline.
The first streamings of your parliament hearings and the vibes made by Google show clearly that they have something in development to boost YouTube to be the streaming platform for television programs.
They bought it 3 years ago. That`s enough time to rewrite the core to make it usable in their concept. It should be time for the release in the next 12 months.
I believe that CR and Cr-esque sites (Hulu’s anime section, Funi’s streaming site, Anime Network’s stream page, etc) will become the future in a few years so long as:
1: The translation quality is great. There have been some pretty terribad stuff come out of the legit end, like how some of the episodes of “The Prince of Tennis”, “Inuyasha: The Final Act” and so on from Viz have have FULL episodes (as in this entire problem repeated the whole time) where the apostrophe was replaced with and “a” with an accent mark over it. There are also episodes like ep. 1 of “Nogizaka Haruka” season 2, where you could’ve punched the screen at how many translation errors were there.
2: Video quality is great (or at least sufficient): I know this the case with every site save Funi’s streaming page, of which hopefully that’ll change (since they have the second largest legal streaming page, aside from CR) with enough time.
3: The price for the material is fair: hulu/ Viz anime (since its the same damn thing >.<) and Funi's page are both free, and CR has most of catalog free along with their currently airing anime coming out a week later, and the price isn't bad at all. A good example of an overpriced stream page, however, is the Anime Network page. Only about roughly 10% of the content is free, and the raminder you have to pay a fee of $7 for little more than an army of catalog content. You would essentially be wasting your money unless you went out of your way to watch more than 2 series and dig through the catalog, ignoring other series ( since most of the series in AN's collection is relatively old you can get most of it for dirt cheap. I mean, I'm buying the individual DVD's for Mythical Detective Loki, and it'll probably cost me a bit less to do that than it will to get a 1 month subscription).
4: The community centering around these pages is decent: Unfortunately, this is where the most work is needed. CR's forums are pretty messy, and too much happens in terms of good conversations, hulu and Funi have no real place to talk at all (I don't really know how this is the case with AN, so no comment there).
And, personally, I don't see fansubs going away anytime soon. Fortunately, the fansubbing group won't be shoved with the "Pirating for pirating's sake" bundle (since they can just download illegal versions of CR subs) but I believe that fansubbing will downsize with time. The main reason that fansubbing can be seen as an art by some is that people learned ( after making it out of necessity) that it could be handled considerably differently by certain people in a way that could be considered artistic. However, if fewer people need fansubs (with the advent of legal streaming) then there will be fewer who will consider doing as a form of art or personal entertainment.
Just a note, while I haven’t made individual replies to all the comments for fear of just repeating what was written in the post, I must say that I am very happy to see so many well thought out replies to the topic. Many of you have made great points or contributed unique personal perspectives on the issue being debated. Thank you all for your excellent contributions.
the way i see it, your both right and wrong at the same time, without a doubt both streaming and fabsubbing will be the future of online anime, however the caveat is that it will need to be both of them, as they would share some kind of qasi-symbiotic relationship where one would not be able to survive without the other
on the legality issue companies for the most part (excluding some cases) won’t care, not because that tracking down each and every person who downloads it illegally is too hard, but because in the end it results in people watching the show and if they like it they buy the merch associated with said show (PVC figures, plushies, themed cups and plates, daikamura’s (sp?), etc) which in the words of yoghurt in SpaceBalls “is where the real money is made”, gundam wouldn’t be half the financial sucess it is at the moment if it weren’t for the peddling of those gunpla kits.
Well, since the population of US + Canada + Europe + Australia and whatever else countries they actually can provide online streams to <<< the rest of the world, I'd go with fansubs. Unless the regional restrictions are lifted fast.
I'm saying this since I live in Malaysia, a country which is generally ignored when it comes to these legal options *rolls eyes* I'm fed up by all these already, I would actually subscribe to CR if they actually let me to. Although I'll still download fansubs for higher quality, because of a certain (stupid) thing called DVD regions, plus the fact that it's actually quite hard to get licensed DVD's in region 3.
So, very nice debate, but fansubs win for me, because (a) legal streaming are not available for everyone (b) since legal ones are not available for us, we don't feel so guilty downloading and
(c) unless their streaming uses P2P, my internet connection just isn't fast enough to load without stalling
I didn’t read the whole article/comments so if this was already covered oh well.
My thoughts on this is screw the legal stuff. People still download tv shows even tho you can watch them online on the networks website. Anime wouldn’t be any different. People are still going to download stuff for two reasons, one no advertisement and two better quality.
But I think sites like CR will continue to do well because they will have subs out for shows faster than anyother group, and lets use naruto as an example, cr subs the show and is released at 3 am pacific or what ever time but it was 4-6 hours faster than dattebayo. The subs aren’t as good but dattebayo dropped the show anyways.
Sub groups won’t be as motivated to sub a show thats already been subbed, so if CR and continue to get more subs then they should be able to become bigger
Btw old CR was amazing, they had 480p streaming before anyother streaming site and i honestly did not see the point of downloading shows, but now they changed. You changed CR you use to be fun…
Damnit, when I last checked the results of the poll on Friday, the Agree side was winning by a considerable margin. Leave for the weekend and when I come back the balance of power has swapped!
Anywho, one thing many people are arguing over is what direction legal streams will take in the future. For the sake of the debate I didn’t pursue that angle because I was simply arguing the case for legal streams as a whole, but I believe that in the future all the streams will be free-for-view with adverts. Want proof? That’s exactly how porn sites make their money and if there’s any business on the internet that is ahead of the game it’s the porn sites.
However if you read the gg interview (and I strongly reccomend that you do) you’ll see that they can’t move to that format just yet because the funds just aren’t there. They would have gone under without subscription money. I guess there just isn’t enough money in adverts just yet.
Some great responses here~
This thread sure has lots of intelligent comments.
Mah 2 cents:
Streaming sites are not going away anytime soon, but I doubt they are going to dominate the future just the way hulu does not dominate TV right now. We could see the rise of something more corporate than Crunchyroll. Sites like that would integrate selling related merchandise, music, etc.
I predict fansubbed anime will pretty much continue to offer the advantages mentioned in the post. Future international copyright law and their enforcement may play a role, though.
I have to disagree because I definaty don’t have money to always pay for crunchyrolls anime membership, also sure they get the ep’s an hour after japan streams them on TV, but If waiting for 2 hours is all it takes to get it free and in still good quality I will go right ahead and wait. Also I used to be a member til they got rid of most of the music, Drama’s and became strict on who can start form topics.
A German Anime Blog linked to an interview with a paid translator.
He sometimes works for CR and shared his opinion about streaming and fansubs etc besides other things.
http://www.ggkthx.org/2010/01/08/responses-from-sam/
I want to support my local distributors. I really do. But the retro stuff I like is far and few and in between locally in Australia.
Australia is a country I love and I hate at the same time Scamp, and you also have to count in that Australians have a worse internet infrastructure than Singapore. Unnecessary bandwidth limits are killing CrunchyRoll’s dominance in Australia just as bad as the region coding is.
Big Copyright/Big Media is a problem for Australia because we get kicked in the stomach like a dingo when it comes to local releases of anything – we never got the Ponyo Blu-ray and we’re not expecting to see the Ouran Blu-ray any time soon. Many shows which are licensed in America have never been licensed here because licensing agreements here are SO. DAMN. SLOW. I’m only on the side of legitimate media because I know it’s right to support the artists – not because I like putting up with region locks and being shut out from content. If I was still an anonymous blogger things would be different – but since I started using my own name on my blog I can’t exactly admit to blogging about fansubs can I?
I’m in a real pickle and Big Media is the dingo that’s eating my baby.
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[...] For example, I’d really like to see Genshiken come out in Australia dubbed and subbed like many other of Australia’s licensed anime DVDs. Only problem is Season 2 of Genshiken is still being dubbed in America. I suspect, that the reason why we’re not seeing the Genshiken anime on DVD here is because the second season hasn’t been dubbed in English yet – and once it has it will be like what happened with Code Geass – for a while we wondered about whether we’d ever see it licensed down under but lo and behold one day it was sitting there in Madman Entertainment’s Coming Soon website feature. Granted – Australian licensing’s happening a lot faster than it used to. By God, it used to be so freaking slow. But I still stand by all the statements I made in my comments to Scamp’s Future of Online Anime debate. [...]