Tag: streaming

The Problem with Streaming

Whither Big Tech?

For many reading this, the issue of problems with streaming video is likely an old subject, but it is one that has recently come home to me, so I’d like to talk about it—with the caveat that I’m no expert in internet technology. There is a real benefit to owning physical copies of content, and that benefit has become increasingly clear to me in recent days.

A few years ago, out of nowhere, the “long lost” English dub of the famous 1982 magical girl series  suddenly appeared without fanfare and without explanation on Amazon. The show had, when translated, been repackaged as a series of “movies,” each consisting of four episodes. Because there were a lot of episodes, there were a lot of movies, and Amazon had foolishly priced them like movies instead of like a TV series, so watching the entirety of the translated Minky Momo could cost a few hundred dollars. I did not watch the entire series, simply because it was ridiculously expensive, but I did watch a fair amount of it, and I had to fork over a lot of cash to do so.

The ability to purchase Minky Momo disappeared as suddenly and soundlessly as it came. The titles are still up on Amazon’s site, but now have the message, “Our agreements with the content provider don’t allow purchases of this title at this time.”

More recently, the same thing happened to . Previously, this series was available at no extra charge with an Amazon Prime membership. Now, it is no longer available. I feel lucky that I saw it before it disappeared. I don’t usually manage to hit the windows of availability like that. It still annoys me, though, since I went to all the trouble of writing reviews, and now the material I reviewed isn’t legally available. A quick search didn’t turn up any news items explaining the end of the show’s availability.

Screenshot showing Lyrical Nanoha unavailable on Amazon Video

To Amazon’s credit, the situation is not as dire as I originally supposed. Nanoha, which was previously free with a Prime membership, is no longer accessible at all, but I can still watch the Minky Momo videos I personally purchased; I’m just unable to purchase new ones, and so is everyone else.

In a sense, I have no cause for complaint, because I can still get access to everything I have directly paid for. But if Amazon goes under (unlikely at the moment, but possible in the future), stops offering streaming, or decides it can no longer host Minky Momo at all, then there it goes, gone from my collection, and there is nothing I can do about it.

It’s for this reason I’ve had a preference for iTunes, even though it has its own issues. When I buy videos from iTunes, I can download the file and keep it myself. Some years ago, I was watching My Little Pony; after a silly controversy, one of the episodes was taken down, censored, and uploaded again, but by the time that happened, I already had the original version of the episode, so I was able to keep it, and neither iTunes nor Hasbro could do anything about it. However, if Amazon or another streaming service decided for any reason to censor content, there would be nothing anyone could do to about it, because the content is not on our own devices.

The very concept of content streaming implies a lot of trust, and big tech companies have adequately demonstrated in recent days that they do not deserve to be trusted. The move toward streaming and data “in the cloud” looks like the setup for a high-tech version of  in which content, even of classical works, can be easily molded and censored to meet the demands of the Party. For the moment, that still sounds like a paranoid fantasy, but in another ten years, it won’t.

And it is not as if there is no precedent. Years ago, I discovered that a middle school English textbook I used had silently deleted all references to smoking from a supposedly complete copy of , a shameless and inexcusable act of censorship. Recently, Sony has gotten into gamer news for censoring eroge games out of Japan; I admit I want those games censored or not published at all, but I also admit that if Sony can censor those, it can censor other things. Then we have Funimation, which has been caught at least twice inserting hamfisted political commentary into English dubs. We have Crunchyroll accused of something similar, though the accusations in that case are more dubious. Even if Crunchyroll is (so far) more professional in its handling of translations, its recent decisions and the antics of its staff inspire that same lack of trust.

Amazon’s catalog of available anime—or at least the anime I’m personally interested in—appears to be shrinking rather than expanding. At present, my plan is to finish up  (still available though the other Nanoha titles are not) and then drop the service like a hot rock. For a little while, Amazon was looking to be a serious contender in the realm of anime streaming with Amazon Strike, but that died quickly. Apparently, anime streaming is the one type of business Amazon can’t completely take over.

Perhaps the problem is that they formerly hosted Minky Momo. According to Japanese legend, Minky Momo is a harbinger of disaster, so maybe she doomed Amazon Strike from the beginning.

Is Crunchyroll Crashing and Burning?

I’ve been hesitant to talk about it because most of what is coming my way is rumor-mongering.

I’ve sometimes defended Crunchyroll on this blog because I like what they do, mostly, but I’m becoming increasingly displeased and am beginning to share the same distaste for Crunchy that colors much of my Twitter feed.

First, there’s Crunchy’s longstanding failure to update its player, which is still running on the security nightmare that is Flash while the rest of the internet has moved to HTML5.

Then there is High Guardian Spice. It’s not so much that Crunchyroll wanted to follow other streaming services in creating dubious original content, but that it rolled it out in the most obnoxious way possible, failing to advertise the show itself but instead virtue-signalling about the sex of the staff working on it. On top of that, further checking reveals that the cartoon is based on somebody’s Tumblr comic, and that the characters are the standard smorgasbord of “diversity,” meaning everyone in the story thinks, talks, and even looks the same. Naturally, Crunchy caught flack for this, and naturally, their response was to accuse fans of various phobias and isms, which only increases my displeasure.

More recently in the same vein, Crunchyroll is now getting accused of manipulating translations to match American political fixations. This is an issue Funimation had in spades, most infamously with Prison School and Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, but has taken steps to correct (by firing its freelancers). I don’t know for sure if Crunchy is actually doing this, but given what we saw of their staff in the High Guardian Spice ad, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t true. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the religion of social justice (for it is a religion) suffers nothing beside itself, so we are almost certainly going to see more and more politically incorrect gender-benders out of Japan being forced through a Gender Studies mold when translated into English. (Ten years ago, if you had told I would be defending Japanese animated traps against the charge of being transgendered, I would have responded 1) that you’re crazy and 2) that I don’t know what those words mean, yet here we are.)

And the huge deal that was Crunchyroll’s partnership with Funimation? Yeah, it’s over. The casualties, according to random people on my social media feeds, amount to 250 series being taken off Crunchy, including several I was looking forward to watching. Rumors have flown all over the place about what led to this, but the official explanation is that it has to do with Funimation’s acquisition by Sony. Some claim that this is Funimation’s rebuke to Crunchy’s rollout of High Guardian Spice, but I suspect that’s wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, Sony, which now owns Funimation, has made a bad reputation for itself with weebs because it is in the habit of heavily censoring eroge games. Personally, I don’t mind if hentai addicts are unable to get their drug, but I am nonetheless against censorship on principle: If they can censor hentai, they can easily move from there to censoring other things—such as anything that doesn’t accord with the social justice cult. If Sony doesn’t want T&A in its video games, then it shouldn’t port the games, not port censored versions. Telling an artist you don’t want his work is fine, but taking his work and changing it to suit yourself is extremely disrespectful. (Ten years ago, if you had said that I would be criticizing the censorship of pornographic video games, I again would have told you you’re crazy, but hey.)

Crunchy was for a while more-or-less the only game in town, but that’s starting to change. Amazon Strike didn’t get off the ground, and Netflix is too busy navel-gazing, but HIDIVE, which is now on VRV, is starting to look like a good alternative for anime streaming—though VRV is closely related to Crunchyroll and was created by some of the same people, so we’ll see what this means in the long run.

I will not be surprised if Crunchyroll goes the way of Tokyopop in a few years. We’ll see. If it does, it might take VRV with it.

I can’t justify more than one streaming service at a time given the pace at which I watch shows and my income. I’m currently on Amazon Prime (mostly because of interest in Made in Abyss), but once I’ve had my way with everything that looks interesting on Amazon, I may make the switch. I notice, for example, that HIDIVE has A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, though only in the dub, and that’s one I’ve wanted to see. In fact, it also has Made in Abyss.

UPDATE: As a reader informs me, Crunchyroll actually has updated its player. I guess I haven’t been on their site in a while. However, a few tests indicate that the new player doesn’t work with ad-blockers.

‘The Vision of Escaflowne’ Is Now Online

Say what you will about Crunchyroll, there’s no denying that they make a lot anime available to us plebs with modest DVD budgets, and they show a genuine interest in archiving the classics, not just streaming the latest moe junk.

I just noticed that they put The Vision of Escaflowne online about a month ago. This is considered one of the greats. About five years ago, I was hunting for a set of it and couldn’t find it, then I enthused about a year ago when I saw that it was out on Blu-Ray.

Well, now it’s also out on a streaming service.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my schedule just filled up.