Anime available on crunchyroll (legal) and fansub: What do you use?

[bigsocce]

If this poll reflects the actual break down of anime fans who use fansubs of shows that are on Crunchyroll, it doesn't sound too good for the site.

Anime available on crunchyroll (legal) and fansub: What do you use?
Crunchyroll 8 22.22%
Fansub 28 77.78%

75% would choose to download fansubs of Naruto, Natsume, Skip Beat! Gintama (all are licensed) rather than go to crunchyroll and watch it for free and legally.

Luckily, this poll doesn't reflect real life or at least crunchyroll hopes not.

[Vexx]

False assessment.... if crunchyroll offered effective competition we might have a true test. So far, they don't seem to offer -
1) A wide diversity of anime: many of us have absolutely no interest in the series Crunchyroll selected.
2) The ability to preview the broadcast version of a series and then acquire DVDs or a high quality set of files (corrected animation, new material, etc).
3) The streaming itself is an issue (many people don't know how to capture streams and the streamer really doesn't want you to know how).

I'd love to be able to preview anime via, say, 50-100MB files and then purchase either DVDs or high definition files. Personally I know how to capture streams but for average joe - a direct download of the preview would be nice. I'd also recommend that the free preview be what was originally broadcast (errors and all) and that the high quality DVDs/files be equivalent to the cleaned up / re-edited / new material versions sold after the series airs.

[Proto]

If this poll reflects the actual break down of anime fans who use fansubs of shows that are on Crunchyroll, it doesn't sound too good for the site.

Considering you applied the poll to a community whose main activity is to be a fansub torrent cluster I would expand my reference population before extracting any assertion

[cyth]

Originally Posted by Vexx

3) The streaming itself is an issue (many people don't know how to capture streams and the streamer really doesn't want you to know how).

I have to disagree with this being an issue for the majority of their visitors. Fansubs became a bigger problem when users started uploading them to streaming websites, so folks who are part of that populace, usually younger people and people with limited broadband options, don't really have a problem with it.

The issue of the availability of physical media, though, is something Japanese distributors will have to figure out as it's the only thing that can make this streaming venture a success.

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by Toua

I have to disagree with this being an issue for the majority of their visitors. Fansubs became a bigger problem when users started uploading them to streaming websites, so folks who are part of that populace, usually younger people and people with limited broadband options, don't really have a problem with it.

I see this thought a lot. It seems to imply that streaming is a magical datapacketless process. Streaming counts against your transfer cap just like direct downloads do, except you don't get to keep it unless you use a capture tool. They are data packets - they count against your total.
In my case, I have a 450MB/day limit on data transfers of any kind in either direction. Two or three movie trailer streams and I'm done for the day unless I want to be throttled back to the Stone Age for 24 hrs. Therefore, I'm not a fan of streams (at least until the ISPs in the US bring its customers into the modern age).

Why... would I *stream* an amateur fansub someone uploaded to a streaming site at all? (when IRC, http/ftp transfer, or torrent gets me the file without having to use a stream capture tool?)

[cyth]

That's a pretty shitty ISP plan, I can't imagine the pain. Although, my girlfriend is on a shared 1 Mbit DSL line, fansub files are growing larger and larger in size, so download times have increased. She relies on services like MegaVideo simply because downloading a 230 MB ToraDora! fansub takes too long. Like I said, I understand that there are people with special circumstances out there, but they're not part of Crunchyroll's business plan. Now that they've essentially yielded to the will of Japanese TV broadcasters, it's easier for them to ignore users like yourself. I mean, the Japanese set their own rules, DTO is out of the question.

[neothe0ne]

I don't watch any shows offered by Crunchyroll. I was considering starting Shugo Chara!! at one point, but now I don't feel like it since it'll be impossible to acquire all the missing episodes in a painless fashion.

However, if I did stumble upon a show Crunchyroll picked up (or Crunchyroll stumbled on a show I'm already watching), I would almost certainly choose a fansub because most fansub encoders don't rape the framerate of the video. I'm trying to watch video here, not slideshows, and I'd rather not pay (or wait) for an inferior product.

This is based on past experience: I purchased all three Slayers series from Funimation on DVD. I had already read on the internet that Funimation's "digital remastered" videos look horrible. However, what I did NOT know was that the Japanese DVD's look SO MUCH BETTER that it's almost like a different show. Granted, each series in Japan takes up 7 DVD's instead of the 4 DVD's per series Funimation used, but while those 7 Japanese DVD's are dual-layered they don't use the full 9.x gb of space. The difference in color alone made me wish I had never given Funimation my money. Let's use stats as well: Slayers NEXT, textless opening. Funimation VOB filesize: 64.5mb. Japanese filesize? 102mb. I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out how much better the Japanese version looks.

(and I still do purchase licensed shows. For example, I've been buying Lucky Star boxes and/or simple DVD's, since Bandai didn't exactly rape anything there)

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by Toua

That's a pretty shitty ISP plan, I can't imagine the pain. Although, my girlfriend is on a shared 1 Mbit DSL line, fansub files are growing larger and larger in size, so download times have increased. She relies on services like MegaVideo simply because downloading a 230 MB ToraDora! fansub takes too long. Like I said, I understand that there are people with special circumstances out there, but they're not part of Crunchyroll's business plan. Now that they've essentially yielded to the will of Japanese TV broadcasters, it's easier for them to ignore users like yourself. I mean, the Japanese set their own rules, DTO is out of the question.

Yes, we're excitedly waiting for Obama to roll up in his Obama-car with a fiber link to our house
In the more practical mean time, our *only* choice is geosynchronous satellite ISP (which has real technical limitations).

Aye... the recent bust up by fansubbers to 220MBish file sizes is starting to bite into even people with much higher transfer caps. So if you know how to capture a stream -- its a bit more appealing because of the file size issue.

I get a little bit of relief via a "happy hour" period after midnight (xfer monitoring is turned off for a few hours). But more and more, I have to go hunt out a coffee shop or community college to victimize (study+torrent).

[bigsocce]

Originally Posted by Vexx

False assessment.... if crunchyroll offered effective competition we might have a true test. So far, they don't seem to offer -
1) A wide diversity of anime: many of us have absolutely no interest in the series Crunchyroll selected.

This poll is only about the SERIES that are available on crunchyroll like Naruto Shippuden, Natsume, Gintama, Skip Beat.

It's a no brainer that 100% would choose fansubs for the series that crunchyroll don't have. Right now for some shows, you can go to crunchyroll and watch or download the fansub and watch. About 75% or more of the people responded say they rather download the fansub and watch. Which is not good news for crunchyroll at all.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news...-on-january-15

The fan group Dattebayo has announced that it will stop subtitling and distributing the Naruto anime franchise "permanently" on January 15. That date is when the Naruto.com, Crunchyroll, Hulu, and Joost websites will officially begin streaming the latest episodes of the Naruto Shippūden sequel series one week after their Japanese broadcast — for free. A Dattebayo organizer who uses the alias "Interactii" says that an episode of Naruto Shippūden would get 450,000 downloads from Dattebayo in its first week. According to Dattebayo, the group accumulated 976,405 downloads for episode 20 in 489 days.

Pretty impressive. Add direct download like rapidshare, megaupload, torrent sites like mininova/piratebay, IRC, etc.... a lot of people are watching Naruto for free. If the fee is 1 cent per viewer (it's about 7 cent for hulu with 3 ads), 1,000,000 viewers would equate to $10,000 an episode (or $70,000 per hulu).

How much does it take to license an moderately popular anime nowaday? cost per episode.

I read that it is down to about $20,000 per episode.

[Ash Falls Town]

Originally Posted by bigsocce

If the fee is 1 cent per viewer

Eh I really doubt that. It's probably more like .01 cent per viewer. Plus Naruto is an outlier. Something like Net Ghost PiPoPa gets probably around 600 views. While translation probably takes around 4-5 hours per episode at around $12.50 an hour or $50+ dollars. Adding sundries and lawyers and you get a big money hole and a devalued product. Anyway internet advertising is just going to get more and more devalued. So I don't really think anything is good for Crunchyroll.

Anyway most people I've seen on the internet seem to actively want Crunchyroll to fail and fansub watchers are always going to move the goalposts. If they got the quality higher, with free at broadcast downloads to own or a choice of extremely high quality streams for everything that has ever been animated in Japan without ads a significant portion of fansub watchers would say something ridiculous like "They don't offer a curly pink font" and still watch their fansubs.

[bigsocce]

Originally Posted by Ash Falls Town

Eh I really doubt that. It's probably more like .01 cent per viewer. Plus Naruto is an outlier. Something like Net Ghost PiPoPa gets probably around 600 views. While translation probably takes around 4-5 hours per episode at around $12.50 an hour or $50+ dollars. Adding sundries and lawyers and you get a big money hole and a devalued product. Anyway internet advertising is just going to get more and more devalued. So I don't really think anything is good for Crunchyroll.

Anyway most people I've seen on the internet seem to actively want Crunchyroll to fail and fansub watchers are always going to move the goalposts. If they got the quality higher, with free at broadcast downloads to own or a choice of extremely high quality streams for everything that has ever been animated in Japan without ads a significant portion of fansub watchers would say something ridiculous like "They don't offer a curly pink font" and still watch their fansubs.

For hulu, it's 7 cent per viewer (they have 3 ads). According to news articles, they receive about 3 times more than TV ad per ad per viewer. I am guessing the reason for this is that on hulu.com, viewer mostly watch the ad. On tv, people mostly change the channel during commercial.

For crunchyroll? Who know.....They got 1 six-second ad and that's it. Good news is that 10,000 people subscribed and pay $7 a month. Some of that money will pay to get the anime. It's a start at least.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news...ad-to-survival

TV Tokyo began putting its "strongest media content" such as Naruto and Gintama on the Crunchyroll video-sharing website in America within one hour of the Japanese broadcast. For that early viewing service, the site has signed up over 10,000 subscribers at about US$7 a month in about a month. By comparison, it took TV Tokyo's AT-X channel a decade to reach 10,000 subscribers. A Naruto episode receives an average of 160,000 accesses on three sites when it streams for free, a week after the Japanese broadcast. According to Iwata, the main purposes of the service are not just the revenues from fees and advertising, but also the counterweight it provides against unauthorized fansub distribution.

Not that good of a counterweight if 75% fans rather watch Naruto on fansub than on crunchyroll

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by bigsocce

Pretty impressive. Add direct download like rapidshare, megaupload, torrent sites like mininova/piratebay, IRC, etc.... a lot of people are watching Naruto for free. If the fee is 1 cent per viewer (it's about 7 cent for hulu with 3 ads), 1,000,000 viewers would equate to $10,000 an episode (or $70,000 per hulu).

How much does it take to license an moderately popular anime nowaday? cost per episode.

I read that it is down to about $20,000 per episode.

Except... thats not even close to the actual number as the article says:

A Naruto episode receives an average of 160,000 accesses on three sites when it streams for free, a week after the Japanese broadcast.

And the first Naruto series had cost far over 50k/episode. Shippuden probably cost around that. Scale all those numbers for other shows and it's just a drop in the bucket.

Originally Posted by bigsocce

For hulu, it's 7 cent per viewer (they have 3 ads). According to news articles, they receive about 3 times more than TV ad per ad per viewer. I am guessing the reason for this is that on hulu.com, viewer mostly watch the ad. On tv, people mostly change the channel during commercial.

They get more money per ad because they are owned by NBC/Universal and thus have the "Your ad will get impressions" power.

[Ichihara Asako]

Originally Posted by Vexx

False assessment.... if crunchyroll offered effective competition we might have a true test. So far, they don't seem to offer -
1) A wide diversity of anime: many of us have absolutely no interest in the series Crunchyroll selected.
2) The ability to preview the broadcast version of a series and then acquire DVDs or a high quality set of files (corrected animation, new material, etc).
3) The streaming itself is an issue (many people don't know how to capture streams and the streamer really doesn't want you to know how).

I'd love to be able to preview anime via, say, 50-100MB files and then purchase either DVDs or high definition files. Personally I know how to capture streams but for average joe - a direct download of the preview would be nice. I'd also recommend that the free preview be what was originally broadcast (errors and all) and that the high quality DVDs/files be equivalent to the cleaned up / re-edited / new material versions sold after the series airs.

All good points, as per usual from you.

I'm not particularly interested in the shows offered. I want better quality previews (Streaming is offensive to my eyes) so I can decide whether to buy it; and then have the ability to do so without regions coming in to play (R4 releases are always well delayed after R1, for instance).

I can capture streams (Download Helper woo) but why would I want to at the dismal pre-VHS quality they offer? It's not sufficient for previewing, because animation quality plays a part in my enjoyment of series which determines whether I buy them.

As for the data, I pay $130 for 60Gb per month. Or a bit over $2 a gig. Thus all downloads, streaming or otherwise, are a financial investment of sorts to me, regardless of how small; a standard 4-5 gig fansubbed series is going to 'cost' me $8-10 (HD upward of $20) if I want to look at it that way. So why would I want to waste time with low quality streams that look absolutely terrible on my monitor or TV alike.

I mean, yeah, for pure previewing just to get the story, smaller streams are obviously a better choice, but as I said, a crappy little tiny res stream at 1920x1080 (who doesn't watch stuff fullscreen?) is horrific, and not a viable preview in my opinion. Especially with anime finally entering the HD world and some series having gorgeous animation that streams mutilate.

I'm not against the industry. I've spent over $20,000 on anime DVDs. Almost all of them are series I first watched from a downloaded TV rip. And it's the way I'd prefer to keep doing things. I do not like the streaming model at all.

[0utf0xZer0]

Originally Posted by Vexx

I see this thought a lot. It seems to imply that streaming is a magical datapacketless process. Streaming counts against your transfer cap just like direct downloads do, except you don't get to keep it unless you use a capture tool. They are data packets - they count against your total.
In my case, I have a 450MB/day limit on data transfers of any kind in either direction. Two or three movie trailer streams and I'm done for the day unless I want to be throttled back to the Stone Age for 24 hrs. Therefore, I'm not a fan of streams (at least until the ISPs in the US bring its customers into the modern age).

OUCH. And I thought my ISP's 60GB for $40 plan was underwhelming. Would be interested in knowing if XDCC transfers show up on your connection, they don't on mine a lot of the time but I imagine that your ISP probably is more ruthless because they're already enforcing such a low limit.

Originally Posted by bigsocce

This poll is only about the SERIES that are available on crunchyroll like Naruto Shippuden, Natsume, Gintama, Skip Beat.

I missed that part because I really skimmed the OP... imagine quite a few others did, too.

I'm actually glad I've never had to face this dilemma, though. Sure, I like giving the creators a little ad money as much as the next guy, but I prefer downloads to streaming in general - and although some of the recent files I've sampled for image quality on Crunchyroll are far better than the practically unwatchable Druaga subs I tried when they first started streaming Gonzo stuff, but there's still noticeable deficiencies in frame rate and image sharpness compared to even very basic fansubs.

Furthermore, while I'd be willing to pay a bit for good quality subs if Crunchyroll had a good selection of shows I liked, this kind of subscription model isn't really how I like to support the creators. I prefer to give money to SPECIFIC creators, because it increases my influence on the market.

Personally, what I'd like to see would be either an ad supported or very cheap (few dollars a month) service offering a wide variety of shows in your typical 175MB xvid (decent quality, works with a wide variety of consumer electronics and easy to convert for others), with the option to buy some good 720P versions for a few dollars per episode. Since I spend a few hundred a year on anime, I'd definately be up for purchasing the latter for favourite shows. Don't see such a service coming about anytime soon, though, particularly due to high licensing costs.

[0utf0xZer0]

Okay, something I'm curious about here:

Clearly, we know that the anime studios get a cut of any downloads people buy of their shows from Crunchyroll, and we know they get a cut of Crunchyroll membership fees. But what about free users? Do studios get a cut of ad revenue from these free users, or are they only putting samples out to get people to buy subscriptions/downloads?

Also, would I be correct in assuming that the download versions of shows are standard def only?

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by 0utf0xZer0

Okay, something I'm curious about here:

Clearly, we know that the anime studios get a cut of any downloads people buy of their shows from Crunchyroll, and we know they get a cut of Crunchyroll membership fees. But what about free users? Do studios get a cut of ad revenue from these free users, or are they only putting samples out to get people to buy subscriptions/downloads?

Also, would I be correct in assuming that the download versions of shows are standard def only?

The details of the deals with the studios are not made public, but I think it's safe to assume that the content holders get a slice of the profit from advertisement revenue... That is, assuming that that revenue is more than CR's delivery charge.

You see, the normal way things work is that before any revenue is distributed CR deducts any costs it entails in the actual distribution, mainly bandwidth and in some cases subtitling fees. After that is subtracted (i.e. used to pay for those things) then whatever remains is divided up according to the contract.

That's the way most internet video streaming is structured.

[wao]

Originally Posted by Vexx

I see this thought a lot. It seems to imply that streaming is a magical datapacketless process. Streaming counts against your transfer cap just like direct downloads do, except you don't get to keep it unless you use a capture tool. They are data packets - they count against your total.
In my case, I have a 450MB/day limit on data transfers of any kind in either direction. Two or three movie trailer streams and I'm done for the day unless I want to be throttled back to the Stone Age for 24 hrs. Therefore, I'm not a fan of streams (at least until the ISPs in the US bring its customers into the modern age).

Why... would I *stream* an amateur fansub someone uploaded to a streaming site at all? (when IRC, http/ftp transfer, or torrent gets me the file without having to use a stream capture tool?)

Speaking for a number of my ex-classmates, at least......

I think in Singapore torrents aren't the first thing people turn to anymore these days, I'm sure you know why; and despite IRC and megashare and other forms of direct downloads a lot of somewhat mroe casual fans I know don't care much about the video quality... they just want to watch something while they have free time. It's much easier to get other friends to watch things to, just lob a link at them and have them watching in 5-10 minutes.
(Stuff like Voices of a Distant Star, before it got licensed and all, used to get passed around by CD though.)

It's this casual market Crunchyroll is targeting, I think (and definitely used to be popular with, at least).

Personally, I watch nearly everything via streaming nowadays because it's just so much faster and I don't care about most shows enough to want to keep them - plus I haven't anyone I want to share them with in particular.
Many times it's just not worth the whole trouble of archiving downloaded episodes anyway...

I just had to watch Xam'd in at least 720p though

[Arveene]

Both, I usually watch Natsume on Mondays as soon as it's available and then when a fansub release is out I'll archive that.