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.
There are classical, “best of all time”, titles that an anime lover like you would defintely enjoy. They’re not available on Crunchyroll, they’re not on Amazon Prime, Netflix, you can’t purchase a copy. A few had selected censored releases in VHS, good luck hunting them down.
The thing with piracy is that it’s not just a money saving trick used by teenagers, it’s also the only way to truly watch the media you enjoy regardless of what some media conglomerate thinks - they no longer get to define how, when and what you’re going to watch. You have to do a bit of setup once… yes that sucks, but from that point onwards, you’re free.
Those I have, some literally on VHS :) When I was young we had a monthly or weekly VHS of best anime from France which I subscribed to. I like some recent stuff that’s very much available on Crunchyroll though plus it’s an easy way to stay aware of releases and such.