Summer 2015 Legal Anime Streaming Thread

BLOCKED [SIMULCAST]:

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Snow White with the Red Hair (Akagami no Shirayuki-hime)
Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace
GANGSTA.
Seiyu's Life! (Sore ga Seiyuu!)
Bikini Warriors
Prison School (Kangoku Gakuen)
Hetalia: The World Twinkle
Aquarion Logos
Aerial Combat Wizard Candidates' Instructor (Kusen-Madoushi-Kouhosei no Kyoukan)
Junjo Romantica 3
Overlord
Castle Town Dandelion (Joukamachi no Dandelion)
SHIMONETA: A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist (Shimoneta to Iu Gainen ga Sonzai Shinai Taikutsu na Sekai)
Site: Funimation

Honestly disappointed they didn't pick up Monster Musume (even if it were region locked I would have preferred it to be in Funi's hands than Sentai).
 
Annoyed that several titles I would have been interested in watching or might have had a glance at have gone to them (Hetalia, Junjo Romantica, GANGSTA. and Prison School).
 
The problem is that CR is by far and way ahead of the game when it comes to the quality of their player - but they problem is, yeah, they don't seem to have much appetite to directly go the extra mile for the UK market, unlike Viewster.

The trouble is, so many years on from CR spearheading legal streaming, everyone and his dog are now wising up to the potential value of it, so everyone is wanting a piece of the pie. Thus, stuff gets locked off into exclusives etc and the end-user loses out - Funi (and I imagine we'll start to see similar tactics from Daisuke too) want in, big time, the trouble is, they're late to the party? So when your player isn't as good and you don't have the same natural following, what do you do? Invest in the one thing that'll bring customers to you no matter what - exclusives.
 
Lutga said:
The problem is that CR is by far and way ahead of the game when it comes to the quality of their player - but they problem is, yeah, they don't seem to have much appetite to directly go the extra mile for the UK market, unlike Viewster.

The trouble is, so many years on from CR spearheading legal streaming, everyone and his dog are now wising up to the potential value of it, so everyone is wanting a piece of the pie. Thus, stuff gets locked off into exclusives etc and the end-user loses out - Funi (and I imagine we'll start to see similar tactics from Daisuke too) want in, big time, the trouble is, they're late to the party? So when your player isn't as good and you don't have the same natural following, what do you do? Invest in the one thing that'll bring customers to you no matter what - exclusives.
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While I certainly appreciate the point, in the anime market I don't think the exclusives are pushing people to use a service - they're moreso pushing people into just downloading or missing out on stuff altogether. I have to say I'm very frustrated with FUNimation this season as they have at least two shows I was pretty interested in and a couple I would have tried and while I know Viewster will probably come through for us I just don't like their service as much as Crunchyroll who I pay my hefty sub for each year. I have nothing against what they're doing and I'm glad someone brings the FUNimation locked titles over, but Crunchyroll has always been and always will be my go-to service for so many reasons.

Shows being exclusive to a certain service really just push me away from watching them. Perfect example is Tokyo Ghoul which I utterly adore but man, jumping through the hoops I need to in order to watch it is a pain and I'm episodes away from finishing whereas stuff like Is It Wrong to Try to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon over on Crunchyroll I watch day and date and have finished. Exclusives are just bad in this market in my opinion and it's a shame this hurdle is getting harder to leap over rather than easier.
 
Marvellous. There were only two shows I was particularly interested in seeing from the summer lineup and Funi has both of them.

I greatly appreciate what the AL/Viewster tag-team is doing to improve coverage in the UK, but as Rui says, the delayed simulcasts hardly make Viewster's service more attractive. Since its last update, I've also found that the Viewster iOS app has an inexplicable habit of kicking my stream into the lowest possible quality (my connection speed is fine, thanks), thus rendering the subtitles illegible and leaving me no apparent way of correcting it.
 
Professor Irony said:
Marvellous. There were only two shows I was particularly interested in seeing from the summer lineup and Funi has both of them.

I greatly appreciate what the AL/Viewster tag-team is doing to improve coverage in the UK, but as Rui says, the delayed simulcasts hardly make Viewster's service more attractive. Since it's last update, I've also found that the Viewster iOS app has an inexplicable habit of kicking my stream into the lowest possible quality (my connection speed is fine, thanks), thus rendering the subtitles illegible and leaving me no apparent way of correcting it.
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I'm sure I read somewhere that they couldn't do DRM on iOS, so had locked it to low res and hard subs to work around... If that you are seeing it only on iOS then that may well explain it...
 
Yeah, I was going to say re. Viewster, their Simulcast of Seraph of the End has been 24-48 hours late for the second time now - I just can't have faith in them as a serious CR competitor if stuff like that continues, even if it is just teething issues.
 
msgeek said:
Professor Irony said:
I'm sure I read somewhere that they couldn't do DRM on iOS, so had locked it to low res and hard subs to work around... If that you are seeing it only on iOS then that may well explain it...
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Yeah, I figured it was hard subbed, but what frustrates me is the way the resolution starts off fine for a minute or two, then decides to switch to 144p instead. I'm guessing it's because my connection isn't sufficiently fast to load enough of the video ahead of the point where it's playing to satisfy some kind of speed check, leaving them to decide that what I really ought to be watching is an authentic late '90s Real Player experience.
 
The Arslan simulcast was delayed this week (again) too, though Daisuki are just as bad delaying the last episode of KuroBas for no valid reason (it's a timed exclusive - they're already muscling in on Crunchyroll there, sadly).

The main reason that CR and FUNi are so good is that both publish release schedules and stick to them with clear warnings when something is delayed, including an estimate of when the episode will appear. That's all. It's so simple, and apparently so hard to do that nobody else has figured it out yet.

The sloppier services all seem to think that setting no schedule means they don't have to commit to airing anything on time, forgetting that the customers know when this stuff is available in other regions anyway. They don't have the right to call themselves simulcasts at all. If I'm watching on a delay anyway I may as well just wait for the better-looking BDs; a delay compared to the first Japanese TV broadcast is understandable (Japan still has regional TV schedules) but I see no reason I have to wait several weeks longer than people in the US for the same content.

I guess FUNi's paywall is part of the reason. So then, just let us pay too for simultaneous access. How hard can it be?

R
 
I messaged Viewster about a bug on their xbox 360 app, which they fixed, and they informed me that they're currently in the middle of changing everything their end, so perhaps we'll see a new/improved website over the next few days along with their summer lineup?
 
Rui said:
The Arslan simulcast was delayed this week (again) too, though Daisuki are just as bad delaying the last episode of KuroBas for no valid reason (it's a timed exclusive - they're already muscling in on Crunchyroll there, sadly).
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The last episode was delayed because of the Japanese broadcast delaying the episode to Today I think.
 
GolGotha said:
I messaged Viewster about a bug on their xbox 360 app, which they fixed, and they informed me that they're currently in the middle of changing everything their end, so perhaps we'll see a new/improved website over the next few days along with their summer lineup?
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They did say that something non-content related was coming on Facebook, but they implied it was an ad-free subscription service.

Rui said:
The sloppier services all seem to think that setting no schedule means they don't have to commit to airing anything on time, forgetting that the customers know when this stuff is available in other regions anyway. They don't have the right to call themselves simulcasts at all. If I'm watching on a delay anyway I may as well just wait for the better-looking BDs; a delay compared to the first Japanese TV broadcast is understandable (Japan still has regional TV schedules) but I see no reason I have to wait several weeks longer than people in the US for the same content.
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Talking about Viewster specifically, most of their deals seem to be licensors rather than distributors. If they're reliant on the JP distributor sending a file to the licensor, then transferring the file to themselves, then themselves or the licensor sending it off for subtitling, then getting the subtitles approved by the JP distributor (and potentially the licensor as well), then reencoding several different times for the website, there's lots of things that can go wrong and lots of people that can behave unexpectedly. Obviously FUNimation and Crunchyroll do the same thing, but both of those have way more money than Viewster and as we all know, money makes the world go round. (And CR doesn't force subtitles, so they can get the file re-encoded as soon as they receive it.)

I think if they could guarantee a schedule they would (as they do with Naruto Shippuden), but the number of moving parts make it difficult.
 
Thanks NormanicGrav, I got so used to their weird delays from before that I forgot to check! I retract my complaint (even though it's still annoying I can't watch on Crunchyroll until two weeks after airing).

If companies can't provide a schedule I'd rather they went back to basics and thought the whole 'simulcast' concept through again from scratch. I appreciate the difficulties (most of which would be completely mitigated by posting the episodes raw and adding the subtitles later when there's a delay) but it's foolishness to persist with a system with so many points of failure when it's completely unnecessary. I know distributors have said there are problems with contracts, but since Crunchyroll can post raws when the subtitles don't exist yet (Kuroshitsuji Book of Circus, several times during its run) it can't be impossible to negotiate this functionality into contracts. And if they can't, they need to stop advertising that they are offering simulcasts in the first place :s

I just feel as though I want to lock all of the company reps (Japanese and non-Japanese) in a room and not let anyone out until they've agreed to a process where everyone works together, globally, to fight against piracy - not their own customers.

R
 
Not a title I would have anticipated from AL. I'll certainly check it out; the premise sounds as though it will either really annoy me or be awesome, and the art is lovely.

R
 
Certainly not one of the expected licenses, but I shall give it a shot. They haven't steered me wrong on pickups yet. (It wasn't on my original to watch list).
 
From the way Viewster have been talking, it's not their only announcement of the season. Looks as if they're dependent on other people's schedules to make their announcements though.
 
NormanicGrav said:
BLOCKED [SIMULCAST]:

BL_v3-1024x682.png


Snow White with the Red Hair (Akagami no Shirayuki-hime)
Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace
GANGSTA.
Seiyu's Life! (Sore ga Seiyuu!)
Bikini Warriors
Prison School (Kangoku Gakuen)
Hetalia: The World Twinkle
Aquarion Logos
Aerial Combat Wizard Candidates' Instructor (Kusen-Madoushi-Kouhosei no Kyoukan)
Junjo Romantica 3
Overlord
Castle Town Dandelion (Joukamachi no Dandelion)
SHIMONETA: A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist (Shimoneta to Iu Gainen ga Sonzai Shinai Taikutsu na Sekai)
Site: Funimation

Honestly disappointed they didn't pick up Monster Musume (even if it were region locked I would have preferred it to be in Funi's hands than Sentai).
Click to expand...

They could still have it, there's two slots not accounted for. One is more than likely DBZ Super and Monster Musume is so Funimation that they have to get it ..right?! (I will be real shocked if it's not announced by them)

On a good note, this means School-Live will probably be on Crunchy, which is a title I pegged down as Funi.

Aoharu x Machinegun isn't in that list either, wonder if A/L will do what they did with Plastic Memories and stream it on both Viewster & CR (presuming it goes onto CR elsewhere that is and it's not one of the final Funi licenses)
 
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