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Comment on Crunchyroll Users Report Use of Controversial 'Hard Subs' on Platform + New Video Player

and allow for more creativity, like strategic placement, multiple colors or fonts, deliberate variation in font size/kerning etc…

Crunchyroll’s subtitle display system was actually really advanced and could do all this stuff anyways, making the move feel even stranger. My guess is they wanted to stop maintaining their own video player without dropping those capabilities.

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wjs018@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Ah, you might be right about this. I hadn’t thought about them dropping support for the .ass sub format.

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Rottcodd@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I dunno… granted that I’m extremely cynical, that just doesn’t sound like corporate behavior. I would more expect CR to just count on exclusive licensing and the convenience of siccing governments on pirates to protect their market share from any possible ill effects of downgrading their player.

I mean - Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to specifically describe a process involving online platforms and a combination of private users and business customers, but really the broad process is common to pretty much every corporate product/service in existence, and undeniably including streaming services.

Again though, I’m extremely cynical…

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- Unboxious@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I think you’re indeed being a little too cynical here. Enshittification happens because corps are trying to squeeze every cent they can out of everyone they interact with. It’s not like they’re going out of their way to make things worse; that’s just an incidental thing that happens sometimes when a guy with an MBA sees a cost he thinks can be cut. In this case I think the target was a relatively expensive development team; any changes to how much work is put into translation and localization would be a separate matter.
  
  Also keep in mind that they have some terrifying rivals - Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+. Each of these rivals has solid offerings in the anime world, and each of them has a deep warchest they could pull from if they wanted to fight Crunchyroll for exclusives. Up 'til now one of the biggest reasons to have a Crunchyroll account over those others has been (believe it or not) the quality of the subtitles. For all of Crunchyroll’s mistakes, those others do it far worse. If Crunchyroll actually dropped their subtitle quality and got rid of features like typesetting I think they’d lose a lot of customers. Oh, and I guess HiDive also exists. They’ll need to make some serious upgrades such as “a video player that plays videos consistently” or “a next episode button that actually plays the next episode” before they can threaten Crunchyroll though.
  
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  - Rottcodd@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Yeah - I’d have to say that I’m being too cynical, since I didn’t see anything there I’d disagree with.
    
    And I hadn’t considered the scale of CR’s competition - that’s a good point.
    
    But then we’re back to it not making sense…
    
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