And this is how I found out.
An article on HiAnime's death and anime piracy in general, from a former industry insider
Submitted 2 weeks ago by Unboxious@ani.social to anime@ani.social
https://animebythenumbers.substack.com/p/rip-hianime
Comments
Susaga@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
shani66@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Anyone got any good alternatives? I was in the middle of the first series of Gundam and I’d prefer not to torrent the entire thing
wjs018@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Just a reminder to folks not to link directly in this community. I don’t want to get ani.social in trouble. Feel free to check out !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com instead.
tgirlschierke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
anikai.to
NineSwords@ani.social 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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.
e0qdk@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
[X] Doubt
shani66@ani.social 2 weeks ago
A lot of this just reads like Crunchyroll propaganda tbh. I’m sure almost every single pirate goes to another pirate site, at most using very poor legal alternatives as a stopgap.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is only true if the legal services actually offer good value and have the content the user is looking for.
Most of the time, pirates are too poor to afford legal routes. Sometimes, pirates are new to a hobby and checking out if they want to spend money, who usually switch to legal routes if they like it. Very rarely you get pirates who do it for the love of the game and were never going to pay to begin with.
And then, there is the rarest of all: an actual, countable lost sale for the business. All the previous methods are not lost sales. A business should not be legally allowed to count them because they werent going to get money from those scenarios. But the rarest instance of all is a person that was going to pay legally, and could definitely afford to, but decided to not pay and pirate instead.
Unboxious@ani.social 2 weeks ago
He used to work for Crunchyroll. I’ve no doubt he’s seen it happen firsthand.
Susaga@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
He probably has, back in the days when Crunchyroll was worth its price. It’s 2026, though. There are many reasons we stopped using it.
Nori@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Yeah that whole thing was a terrible read. The hydra grew back more heads back in the day and it will continue to do so this time.