Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
EDIT: Link was taken down thanks to someone in the comments here’s the archive for the page https://web.archive.org/web/20251004184506/https://fandomwire.com/crunchyroll-faces-cancelation-why-anime-fans-are-choosing-piracy-after-latest-update/
https://bsky.app/profile/lamhfada.bsky.social/post/3m2c3udxnjc2u
Don’t forget that Crunchyroll is also owned by Sony, who have basically picked up a monopoly on anime streaming services by buying out all of the competition. Aniplex, Funimation, Crunchyroll, Kadokawa, all under the Sony umbrella.
And still can’t offer the full catalog in my country
I hate that some seasons shows are on Netflix, but the rest are only on CR
Just canceled. Thanks.
All the streaming services are unethical now, both in pricing and operation. Netflix is maybe the least bad, but I can’t justify the cost for that, either.
Stremio + Torrentio is the way to go.
What happens next is like what happened in the 2000s. People will turn to piracy as legitimate content is no longer feasible, affordable, or ethical. Then the corporate oligarchs will crack down violently to make examples of the people they’ve given no other choice or recourse.
It’s time to eat the rich.
Netflix charges me, a single guy, for 4 simultaneous streams if I want 4k. So I shared with my parents.
Then they had the audacity to stop people from password sharing or to charge even more if you want to share. I set up an automatic email forward so my parents get every sign in related email.
people they’ve given no other choice or recourse
I don’t know, I find I also have the option to not consume media that I can’t pay for or justify ethically. For instance, the only streaming service we have a subscription for is The Criterion Channel.
I’m looking for an ethical anime streaming service rn, and i’d be willing to pay for it (like, $10/month). Any options at all?
Like, “ethical” means that the money is used to keep the studio running that is producing the anime; not that the money goes to some big banks to profit off anime.
yeah, that just doesn’t exist anymore
True. But many people can justify it ethically.
Good for you, but Oovid opened my eyes to how different our living conditions are.
Some people may have may many alternatives, some few and some none
Stremio + Torrentio is the way to go.
Torrentio has started blocking VPNs.
Netflix is training AI on the work of the artists in the animation department. They’re absolutely not the least bad, they’re all equally terrible.
Oh, didn’t realize this. Had a rolling sub which I never bothered to cancel as I very occasionally watch with mates, but have now cancelled it.
I cancelled it because I forgot I had it a few days ago. This is merely coincidence to me but nice coincidence.
When property is valued over people, piracy is protest. Pirating undermines a system that guards profit while neglecting humanity. Every download is a refusal to accept laws that protect wealth over well-being.
fan subs are best
Kind of miss how much effort went into fan subs, with notes explaining things that didn’t exactly translate without context…
Not just the notes, but I feel like they put more effort into making sure the text doesn’t blend with what is on screen. Instances on Netflix of some shows where there will be white text with a white background, and the text has no drop shadow or black border.
Oh man, I remember seeing things go from burned in subs to sub tracks with all kinds of nice functional markup and managed font color schemes and such to… Slapping white text with no border/shadow in the bottom middle of the video unconditionally without formatting…
Well the advantage of having the subtitles be a text overlay over the video is that the subtitles can be separated from the video; like, you can switch them off and on and change languages (which i sometimes do as i speak multiple languages and am interested in how they translated it) without having to store multiple GB-sized video files - one for each language - for the same episode.
What are you talking about? You can do text styling even with toggleable subs. It’s why fansubbers started using .ass/ssa for subtitles back in 2005. No one sane has burned subs into the videos for more than 20 years at this point.
^ this
To the extent they exist
“keikaku means plan”
I will forever recognize the Baar Sophia font from the fansubs of Naruto which got me into anime in the first place
<3 graphic designers unite
I would very much like a streaming service that makes it transparent what it actually spends its income on.
Like - a streaming service where i pay $10/month and 90% of that goes to the studios/artists that actually produce the anime? I would take that.
But right now i’m worried that i pay $10/month and 90% of that goes to the shareholders of the streaming provider as “profit” while the studio gets almost nothing.
Yeah… sweet summer child you might not want to read Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s closer to 99% for BigContent lawyers and right holders and less than 1% for actual creators.
And the Spotify ceo just stepped down so he could focus on weapons systems for Israel. The people running all of our media services are Nazis.
Fascism is the natural end stage of capitalism. Plenty of businesses that have no core connection and competency with the military are embedding themselves into the military. For now, most of the US top brass loathe the Trump administration, but eventually they will be replaced by loyalists. We might get a real life Enclave if something isn’t done to rid the fascists.
why not just pirate shit without a noble cause for once? You know - the old fashioned way
what are the good sources nowadays…been out of the game for awhile and it’s to trust any sites promoted on any mainstreamish social networks.
like freemediaheckyeah, old reddit hub…is that still good?
ime every pirate source had 50/50 shot of turning into some virus/scam honeypot shortly after reaching high enough popularity
I just bookmark the piracy megathread/wiki thingy, lemmy/reddit (backup). For streaming, I would probably recommend hydra, it’s really all the same but that site has “auto-next” which I prefer. There was one site I used to enjoy that was just better than any streaming platform I’ve paid for, skip intro, skip credits (would even detect after credit scenes), subtitles in all languages and audio tracks even commentary, quick responsive high quality loading of any media your mind can remember. They went after it hard and I haven’t seen a proper iteration since (every clone slowly lost features as they were whack-a-moling).
For downloading, they’re really all crappy (several link hoops to jump through) and hit or miss (for quality and selection you can’t beat the ease of a torrent unfortunately). You can find what you want eventually but the difference in hassle is just crazy.
nyaa. Just look for a currently active Nyaa torrent site for anime. There’s several.
Fmhy ✅
I mean, I basically just download anything that’s not an executable. So if its a video, audio, pdf, epub, etc… I don’t worry about it. Its very rare for an updated system to get infected from a random .mkv.
I just use (https://fmhy.net/torrenting) one of the torrenting aggregators because its the most comprehensive search, I found an anime that I couldn’t find anywhere else because there are dead torrents with no seeders everywhere else I looked.
You can get the Evangellion dub off of internet archive, found that out a couple of days ago cause bored.
no idea, man. I’m just a poser)
https://fmhy.lol/ Free Media Heck Yea has loads of free content across tons of topics listed.
Greed kills
Ha fuck… that was my last personal sub… any alternative beside the high seas? I’m seasick…
Honestly, piracy is easier than it ever has been. You can automate torrents or usenet downloads with the *arr suite. There’s a bit of a learning curve to get it set up… But once it’s running, it’s basically just “add show to your watchlist” and ~15 minutes later it shows up on your media list with full metadata, subtitles, etc ready to go.
Plenty of people will suggest stremio, which is… Contentious. It works for streaming by downloading a torrent to cache. After you watch it, stremio automatically deletes the cache. So in day to day operation, it uses very little hard drive space and primarily relies on your internet speed and properly seeded torrents. But that latter part is the problem… Since it deletes the cache, it isn’t actually seeding anything in return. If everyone used stremio, nobody would actually be able to use it, because none of the torrents would be seeded. It’s a sort of mass prisoner’s dilemma.
Technically, you can set stremio to keep a rolling cache of {x} size, and it will hold onto the torrents until you start to download something new and it needs that space. But very few people will expect to hit a 1.0 ratio, even with a decently sized cache.
The whole point is not to do any setup and maintenance just to watch anime… I already have a job where I have to do that and I was hoping that it would pay for the convenience. My passion is watching anime, not setup downloading pipeline for them.
The point of the setup is you only need to do it once, you don’t set up everything every time you want to download something…
Lol I can just add it to my phone’s torrent client when I have a plan to watch something, then later begin download when I have wifi (or if you have unlimited high speed data, that also works… sort of…), usually like before bed when the phone is plugged in, then wake up and its done downloading.
You can pre-download the next thing you plan to watch before you finish your current thing. Same for TV Shows and movies.
If you don’t use your phone for work, you can also just leave it charging and use their wifi (with VPN obviously) to torrent then come come and have it ready to watch, usually unless it has low seeders.
Watch using VLC.
(Afaik, there’s no torrent client on iOS, so this is Android only… we’ll see what happens with Android torrent clients after 2027… it works for now)
(That’s the simplist thing to do. You can also remote into a computer,but that’s a bit more complicated.)
The end goal was always to deprive us of alternatives
There’s always torrents but it was very convenient to just go to crunchy and start something… torrenting and putting it in plex and all… it’s just less convenient
They took our comments and reviews, now they’re ruining subtitles, are delayed, etc. The arr stack is starting to be just as convenient if not more.
Lord Gaben said it best, piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem (the people who couldn’t afford it weren’t going to buy it anyway).
You’re right about comments and reviews… I miss some of that. You’re also right quoting the old Gaben. But still… it seems we can’t keep any nice things for long :-/
Has he actually changed his stance on piracy? I hadn’t see anything to indicate that but maybe I’m mistaken.
Usenet is great also downloads very quickly. Just automate the whole process.
I was doing usenet more than 10yrs ago… not that straightforward, needs a subscription anyway… and the whole NAS + plex or something similar is still needed. I get the idea but there’s a point in life where 10€ per month for the ease of use is very appealing.
I pay around 2 to 3 dollars a month, I bought lifetime index subscriptions.
Look into setting up an -arr stack. Overseer with radar/sonaar plus your torrent client of choice and a VPN. The setup takes a weekend at most and the final product is honestly easier to use then navigating shitty streaming services now. It actually is more convenient after just a little bit of setup.
HiDive. Until they get the fuckaround bug.
The pirate life is the only life for me.
And it’s been working for decades, always getting laughed at by the newest hype but yet again persisting.
Also it turns out companies do it and it wouldn’t work otherwise (see ai training)
The problem here is that all these major anime providers are owned by Sony, so you’re kinda fucked if you want to boycott them.
Well shit. If this goes through I’ll have to cancel
https://xcancel.com/sugoilite/status/1973732830334292420?s=46&t=qypRlc3aYixql0uGFrdzNA
Many people noticed that the changes in the subs, they used to translate text in the background for example.
Oh so it has gone through? Fuck. Time to cancel then
