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A lot of people that watch anime do it illegally and there are multiple reasons for that. I tend to stick to official sites like Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE, but they definitely have their issues that lead to people wanting to pirate anime instead. These issues could be with the sites themselves because there's something wrong with the video player or it could even be the people running the service. Some of these people I hear pretty bad things about and they can be pretty out of touch with the community a good chunk of the time.
Now for the obvious reason people don't like using official services: the ads. If you pay for a subscription you can watch the videos with no ad breaks. However, some streaming services make you pay for a subscription with ads. Thankfully, most of the anime streaming services I use don't make you sit through ads with paid accounts. Some free viewers will try to get around the ads by using adblockers, which most of time end up eventually getting blocked so they'll have to start viewing ads again, unless they over to the shadier side of anime viewing. But is getting ads while watching anime really a bad thing? When I use the apps for the services, I can sit through them no problem. In all honesty, how is it different from sitting through ads when watching cable? A big difference with these streaming services is that there is some consistency in how the ads play. VRV will have three ad breaks during a free twenty something minute episode and one during a ten or so minute episode. There are episodes so short that no ads will play on a free account too. Each ad break usually only has three ads. Funimation plays one at the beginning of the video and then there are three more breaks for ads, but each break plays like four this time. A little annoying but not the end of the world. But still, people would rather go without ads, so they'll go over to a piracy site to watch. They won't get ads during the video but there are all kinds of questionable ads on these sites which can even lead to someone getting adware. People do try to get around these by using adblockers but some of these piracy sites do fight back and ban people for using stuff like adblockers or even VPNs. Gonna be real honest here: I'd much rather deal with the ads on an official site than be at risk of getting adware. It's not just the ads, though. There are multiple streaming services out there, each with different shows and rules. For the most part, only a portion of their content is available to free users, but some sites like Crunchyroll do offer a reasonable amount of content for free users. By paying a subscription fee, you get access to a service's entire library without ads. This leads to my next point: anime is split across multiple different streaming services. While some offer free shows, others have nothing or close to nothing available to those that aren't willing to pay up. I highly doubt a lot of people would want to pay for multiple streaming services at once when there's no guarantee they're going to use them all within the month, since subscriptions are paid monthly. Anime fans would love to have access to all of this stuff at once, but not everyone is willing to pay that much money just so it's all available to them so that's another reason they go over to those piracy sites, because they have pretty much anything, subbed or dubbed, regardless of who has the streaming rights. But since everything's split up, that makes it harder to anime fans to watch their shows cleanly. By having multiple services, they're all going to follow different rules and their inconsistencies are definitely going to irritate some people. What each site does differently is what's available to free users and what isn't. On Crunchyroll, new episodes are free after a week. There are some exceptions though, including some dubs that are only on the site temporarily for some reason, and some OVAs, which I kind of understand. For the most part, Crunchyroll's stuff does not stay locked on premium. Then there's Funimation, who decides what's premium and what's not whenever the hell they feel like it. What I understand the least of all about them is why they'll have some shows available in Japanese with subtitles for free but not the dub even when the dub has been out for a long ass time. And what I understand even less is when the latest season of a show can be watched dubbed by free users but not the previous ones. Seriously, Funimation, what the hell are you guys smoking? So, there's no consistency in what's premium only and what isn't. New shows get locked behind a paywall for a while and at least half the time, the restriction eventually gets removed, but the timing just isn't good. Maybe I'm spoiled by Crunchyroll, but there's way too long of a gap. For a seasonal anime, I can wait more than one week for an anime, but when it takes months, things are a little ridiculous. I can understand making a dub premium only when the dub itself is fairly new but there's no reason that I can't watch older shows dubbed but can still watch them in Japanese! Honestly, the worst part of one of their shows having both Japanese and English audio is they don't make it clear before you click on a video that it can only be watched in Japanese if that is the case. A "subscribe" icon usually shows up on a video if it requires a subscription, but if at least one language is free, it's gone and can lead to a user assuming the dub is free too. This is freaking ridiculous, Funimation. Then there's HIDIVE, which is pretty much premium only. I got to try out a free month thanks to Anime Expo, so that was nice. So with them, you're not really watching anything without a subscription. They do have free episodes, but that's it: free episodes. Just the first episode of some hand-picked shows. Lame. As for their library, it's fine. They've got some exclusives but honestly, I don't really see much of a reason I've using this unless you like dubs by Sentai, which are exclusively on here because of their partnership. Most of the shows they have can already be watched free in Japanese with subtitles elsewhere, like Crunchyroll. These are just the ones I've used. Of course there are more like Tubi, Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu. Tubi's all free, but their stuff can be removed at any time and their selection is pretty limited. Amazon has shows that you can watch with prime but some shows you have to buy episodes individually for some reason. Then Netflix and Hulu require subscriptions. The former used to have partnerships with Yahoo and Anime Planet and allow users to watch anime from them for free, but as far as I can tell, that's all gone. It's really frustrating how we have to go through so many different sites to watch all the anime we want to watch. And it's not just anime that's guilty of this. Shows over here in the west are on too many damn streaming platforms, because everyone and their dog thinks that they have to have one, and then they wonder why everyone's pirating their stuff. Whether you using streaming services for anime or other shows, they're all going to split across the different services. Each service will only show what they have a license to stream and in some cases, it's questionable where a show goes. For example, the dub of New Game has been offline for almost a year after Funimation and Crunchyroll split up. When they split up, they started discussing who would get what shows, so Funimation was able to increase their subbed library and Crunchyroll got a handful of dubs originally on Funimation. Apparently, New Game was one of the dubs Crunchyroll was supposed to get, but I guess they can't make up their minds about who gets it. And then there are odd cases where a title dubbed by Sentai isn't even on HIDIVE. Angel Beats in on Netflix, and that might have something to do with Aniplex having involvement with that anime. But the subtitled version is on Crunchyroll, so what the heck? Some shows that people would want to watch just don't even get put on the official streaming services for one reason or another. The second season to Skilled Teaser Takagi-san has wrapped up but was never picked up by any of the official streaming services. At least any that I know of. And when I say this, I mean services in the west. I don't feel like I'm missing out on much by not having it, but there are people that enjoyed the first season and would most likely love to see the second. So when the official streaming sites don't have the show they don't want to watch, what do weebs do? They're gonna over to those piracy sites because they have pretty much anything regardless of whether or not it's been on an official platform. Not only do they have official dubs, or subtitles, but there are also fansubs and occasionally fandubs in situations like these. It's cool that people are willing to put in the effort to do that kind of stuff, but it doesn't make it any less y'know, illegal. To make things even worse for legal services, if you look up anime streaming services, a lot of the results you'll get are for the illegal ones. There are even sites listing their recommendations for streaming services and yes, they do include the piracy sites. There are ways the official sites can fight piracy, such as opening up more content for free users and placing ads on videos or making sure their stuff is up to date. They amount that they charge really doesn't help them out, but they probably feel they need to charge that much because people are pirating, so I don't know if you can really win there unless you can somehow convince more people to come over. Honestly, what we really need is a site with everything people would want to watch all together in one place with everything at a decent price. This way people would be much less tempted to pirate. As long as they don't have the crappy restrictions Funimation has, I'm sure they'll do great. The closest we've had to something like that, at least in the United States, is VRV, which is a collection of different streaming services in one place including: Crunchyroll, HIDIVE, Rooster Teeth, Cartoon Hangover, Boomerang, and more. They used to have Funimation, but they left after ending their partnership with Crunchyroll, so yeah, have fun being a victim of piracy, guys. The biggest problem is everyone wants their own service but when you keep having that attitude you're just going to make people want to pirate even more. Even if there is a good solution to this, like the idea I mentioned, there will still be piracy but I feel like it could be greatly reduced, but the thing is, the people running the streaming services aren't smart enough to realize the problem. |
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