Comment on An article on HiAnime's death and anime piracy in general, from a former industry insider
NineSwords@ani.social 3 days ago
The Gaming and Music industry (as well as early streaming Netflix) has shown that people are willing to forgo piracy and pay a reasonable price for a service if the service is more convenient and, at the very least, of on-par quality with pirated content. and I’m very sorry for Crunchy, but nothing of this is applicable to them.
Unboxious@ani.social 3 days ago
I’m not really sure that argument works here. Sure, Crunchyroll has its problems. I could list several things I’d like to see them change. But are the common piracy sites out there any better? I loaded up the first episode of Journal With Witch (arguably Crunchyroll’s best show from this season) on both Crunchyroll and on one of the bigger remaining piracy sites. The experience was pretty close to identical. Even the subtitles were word-for-word the same, since those were just ripped from Crunchyroll anyways. You might be able to get better subtitles if you looked for a torrent, but if the numbers in this article are accurate over 95% of anime pirates are streaming directly from sites like the one I visited rather than torrenting. I believe those numbers too. It’s not like the torrent numbers are in any way invisible or difficult to measure.
I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t pirate. I’m saying that we should be honest with ourselves about why we pirate, and consider if there might be other ways we could give back to the anime industry. It’s super cool that Studio Trigger has a patreon. I wish more studios would do that.
As an aside, if you want to talk about bad service I think the worst culprit here is the blu-ray. It’s actually absurd that if I shell out for a blu-ray there’s no practical way to play the thing on my laptop, phone, or tablet because they’ve gone out of their way to pay for DRM to make it harder for me to do that.