Crunchyroll streamed anime

I’ve been checking out the “Crunchyroll” anime streaming site (www.crunchyroll.com/anime).

Crunchyroll has been getting some stick on the newsgroup rec.arts.anime.misc recently. Some people aren’t happy that a group previously (allegedly) associated with piracy is now offering licensed anime streams. Seems they think that Crunchyroll, having (according to them) helped kill off much of the anime industry, is now scavenging the corpse.

On the other hand, if you check the Crunchyroll site, you’ll find that you can stream at least three new shows licensed from the latest Japanese summer season, and a selection of other shows, at least some of which might be to your liking.  So that’s several shows you could watch with a clear conscience instead of  getting digisubs via bittorrent.  Some of the shows in the index are marked as being available to the UK, some are not.

One can’t help noticing that while sundry of the Crunchyroll offerings are not indexed on animesuki.com, some people are still offering them as downloadable digisubs, offering excuses such as their version is a different sub, or they don’t like the adverts.

As for the Crunchyroll service itself, given a suitable PC and fast Internet connection, it works quite well. There’s an A-Z index of anime (with the Japanese titles only), as well as thumbnails of “popular anime”, and once you select a series there is a row of episode thumbnails with a synopsis. On selecting an episode, you get an un-avoidable advert, usually for some Japanese video game, and then the episode, with a choice of  definitions (I’ve only tried the SD default, which is good enough). The episode can be re-sized to full screen (but I could not re-size the adverts, which I did not consider to be a problem).  Subtitles are selectable on/off. With a cable link to a TV and audio amplifier, the experience is little different from watching a subtitled DVD.

The service is supported by advertising, but the very latest episodes are restricted to “members only” so if you want to watch those without waiting a week, you have to pay.

This looks like a site that deserves one’s qualified support, and I intend to watch Aoi Hana, Time of Eve, Kanamemo, etc on Crunchyroll in preference to trying to download them.