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.

EDIT: Link was taken down thanks to someone in the comments here’s the archive for the page https://web.archive.org/web/20251004184506/https://fandomwire.com/crunchyroll-faces-cancelation-why-anime-fans-are-choosing-piracy-after-latest-update/

https://bsky.app/profile/lamhfada.bsky.social/post/3m2c3udxnjc2u

    • arararagi@ani.social
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      4 days ago

      I miss them because when something like Seitakoi no Ichizon made reference jokes, instead of localizing they had translator notes at the top explaining the reference and what it was from, I learned so much old japanese otaku culture back then thanks to it.

    • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 days ago

      My daughter got into anime through friends and I got some street creds by talking about how things used to be. Buying laserdiscs in Japan, subbing them and showing them at conventions. I subbed two episodes of some show I don’t remember. Or shipping VHS tapes across continents. My daughter doesn’t care, of course. But her friends were impressed. I fear that that was my last hurrah, though. I got nothing else.

      • nullroot@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        I’ve been an anime of crunchy roll with those auto ai subs and the main character is called Kun. Holy shit half the time it’s censoring itself because it’s trying to say something racist, but not always…

    • exu@feditown.com
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      9 days ago

      There are barely any real fansubs left. Most are Crunchyroll, Netflix or Funimation restyled and maybe retimed plus checked if they spent a lot of time on it.

      • miss phant@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 days ago

        And that’s honestly all that’s needed, the official translations are usually perfectly fine. The elaborate typesetting is what makes the fansubs so good.

      • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub
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        9 days ago

        I’m an old pirate who remembers, and the thing, the raw ingredient missing in this scenario?

        need

        If it didn’t exist, if there was no possible way to get a copy of somesuch Gundam episode whatever in english, some dude somewhere would cross the ends of the earth to get it onto the internet. Piracy is motivated entirely by utility and need, it’s why music piracy atrophied into almost nothing until Soulseek arrived and streaming prices increased. Supply met demand, and it will again for fansubs.

        If it’s needed, someone will meet the need. We did it in 1998, we’ll do it next year.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      That‘s how Crunchyroll itself started out if I remember correctly. Now look at it, completely unrecognizable. It‘s exemplary for how things have been progressing or rather regressing this century so far.

  • BilSabab@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    why not just pirate shit without a noble cause for once? You know - the old fashioned way

    • IronBird@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      what are the good sources nowadays…been out of the game for awhile and it’s to trust any sites promoted on any mainstreamish social networks.

      like freemediaheckyeah, old reddit hub…is that still good?

      ime every pirate source had 50/50 shot of turning into some virus/scam honeypot shortly after reaching high enough popularity

      • Cataphract@lemmy.ml
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        9 days ago

        I just bookmark the piracy megathread/wiki thingy, lemmy/reddit (backup). For streaming, I would probably recommend hydra, it’s really all the same but that site has “auto-next” which I prefer. There was one site I used to enjoy that was just better than any streaming platform I’ve paid for, skip intro, skip credits (would even detect after credit scenes), subtitles in all languages and audio tracks even commentary, quick responsive high quality loading of any media your mind can remember. They went after it hard and I haven’t seen a proper iteration since (every clone slowly lost features as they were whack-a-moling).

        For downloading, they’re really all crappy (several link hoops to jump through) and hit or miss (for quality and selection you can’t beat the ease of a torrent unfortunately). You can find what you want eventually but the difference in hassle is just crazy.

      • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
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        8 days ago

        I mean, I basically just download anything that’s not an executable. So if its a video, audio, pdf, epub, etc… I don’t worry about it. Its very rare for an updated system to get infected from a random .mkv.

        I just use (https://fmhy.net/torrenting) one of the torrenting aggregators because its the most comprehensive search, I found an anime that I couldn’t find anywhere else because there are dead torrents with no seeders everywhere else I looked.

    • Aljernon@lemmy.today
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      8 days ago

      Old Fashioned Pirates were poor people treated like shit by their society lashing out at the system of oppression.

  • phx@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    I much prefer owned media over subscriptions, but this is perhaps one area where they’re actually good. A bad business decision that drives away customers can have a pretty immediate and visible impact on revenue. It’s not “hey nobody bought our latest release, blame racism/sexism/wokeness” or whatever other whipping-boy they choose to bury their heads in the sand with, it’s “we did a thing and within days to a month people were leaving us.”

    In many cases, this drives them to actually pay attention to customer reactions. We’ve seen the same with Disney in regards to Kimmel and I wouldn’t be surprised to see recent changes to Gamepass have a similar impact. I hate to say it, but subscriptions like this really do allow customers to vote with their wallets.

    Which is also why many are probably going to try to lock more customers in to longer terms, add gimmicks, and generally make it harder to unsubscribe. Kinda like phone companies. We’ll likely end up with a “streaming sign-up/connection fee” and offers like “**free Frozen tablet with a two year Disney+ subscription”

    ** regular price $599, applied as a discount from your regular bill over 24mo

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      They’ve been on borrowed time since Sony bought them. Honestly I’m amazed they’ve lasted this long.

    • quant@leminal.space
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      9 days ago

      Oh they do remember. They fondly remember those early years piggybacking on strangers goodwill before laughing all the way to the bank.

  • vateso5074@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Don’t forget that Crunchyroll is also owned by Sony, who have basically picked up a monopoly on anime streaming services by buying out all of the competition. Aniplex, Funimation, Crunchyroll, Kadokawa, all under the Sony umbrella.

    • Strider@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      And it’s been working for decades, always getting laughed at by the newest hype but yet again persisting.

  • Verdant Banana@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    If you do not want to support then stop consuming which can not do because everything needed or wanted is all controlled/produced by the same owner class and switching companies means switching between different companies all owned by the same owner class just like news and newspapers

    Same scam that is done on elections to give the illusion of choice but the puppet master never changes face just the puppets

    No other companies to switch to for baby formula, diapers, bottled or otherwise water, foods by any brand all same owner at the beginning of the chains, all media is all owned at the very top by the same owner class, movies including super hero ones all owned by that same entity, vehicles that move us and products around all owned by the same people even if the countries are different and the names changed at the very very top are the same owner class

    Got us plain and simple

    • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      Same scam that is done on elections to give the illusion of choice but the puppet master never changes

      Fuck off with that ‘both sides the same’ bullshit. We’ve very conclusively proven that no, one side is much fucking worse.

      • Verdant Banana@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        one side may be worse but the less evil side is still working with the more evil side just like how the DNC went

            • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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              9 days ago

              Is that an app? I’ve been hoping someone makes a desktop client that improves the lemmy experience like the reddit ones used to do

              • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                9 days ago

                Yeah, it’s Voyager. You can long-press on a username to add a user tag. And if you come across the same account later, editing the tag will give you a button to jump to the comment you originally used to tag them.

                It also automatically tracks votes, so that [-6] is my running vote total for this user. So I tend to downvote them pretty often compared to upvotes. It makes spotting trolls/idiots a lot easier.

                Lastly, (though it isn’t marked here) it will add a baby emoji to any accounts that are new. That one is nice because you often find brand new accounts posting really divisive shit, and they’re obvious troll/astroturf accounts once you realize they’re freshly made.

  • demonsword@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    And there goes the last streaming service I still paid to access. It was convenient exactly because of the subtitles…

    Everything now must flow through my -arr stack.

    The zionism thing was the icing on the shit cake. Fuck that genocidal ethnostate, and fuck all genocide enablers.

  • rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works
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    9 days ago

    Oh, didn’t realize this. Had a rolling sub which I never bothered to cancel as I very occasionally watch with mates, but have now cancelled it.