Crunchyroll

Crunchyroll

Stop f***ing around already and give me ANIME!

Type of site:	Video streaming service
Language:	English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Arabic, Italian, Russian
Owner:	Kun Gao
Date of launch:	May 14, 2006
Status:	Active

Crunchyroll is an American distributor, publisher, licensing company and international online community focused on video streaming East Asian media including anime, manga, drama, music, electronic entertainment, and various other content. It was founded in May 2006 as a for-profit video upload and streaming site by several University of California graduates. Crunchyroll is a subsidiary of Ellation, part of Otter Media, a subsidiary of Warner Media, which is owned by AT&T. It has been widely criticized for its subpar streaming services.

Why Their Business Is Rotten

It started out as a piracy site. But eventually they opted to go legit.
Being ran by the University of California and AT&T should ring red bells, since these organizations have been noted for being against free speech.
Crunchyroll does a poor job at making accurate subtitles for anime, at times the localization is sub-par even by fansub standards.
For a very long time, Crunchyroll required the dying Adobe Flash to function even when most other sites moved on to HTML 5. Eventually a HTML 5 plugin for Crunchyroll was released and it had solved numerous issues, such as not being able to rewind to the 0:00 mark on Flash.
The comment section on the site is broken, only a handful of comments show up on certain videos and the filtering system is quite buggy.
Subpar video quality, to the point that many consider piracy a better alternative to watch anime.
Their low quality awards show.
It used to have a downloading function but it got killed off back in 2010, partly because how poorly advertised the function was, and partly because it still has DRM.
It doesn't have an API for users to help with fixing the broken site.
The streaming service is overpriced compared to other websites, Crunchyroll also has a smaller selection of shows.
Tons of irrelevant content.
Crunchyroll was also known to be on the "woke" side, for instance they somehow find the need to held a LGBT panel during a convention. When questioned about it, Crunchyroll simply replied "Because anime is for EVERYONE", as if suggesting the community is excluding queer people for no good reason when it's not the case. What's worse is that in said panel, during 45 minutes, the staff was talking about their personal experience as LGBT people instead of discussing topics such as the representation of LGBT in anime, which would definitely be a better fitting topic for a anime-themed business' panel.
The ads in the video are also quite annoying due to being unskippable and they often cause lagging to occur.
The controversy with their upcoming original show High Guardian Spice also revealed more issues:
- Crunchyroll often tries to guilt people into paying, claiming that the money will be supplied to small Japanese creators, instead Crunchyroll has been using that money to host their own conventions and make their own animation, making them look highly hypocritical. If you want to support anime in a way that you know it will get there, buy their official merchandise.
- Even more unacceptable for the otakus is that High Guardian Spice is not even an anime, its just a generic art style with Asian elements thrown in. It's setting is also unoriginal and has been accused of ripping off RWBY and Little Witch Academia.
- Crunchyroll also spent lots of time in the show's trailer to boast how "diverse" their creators are rather than showcase the show itself. Anime and Manga has often been considered to be one of the last bastions in entertainment which is free of identity politics and social justice, adding these elements ended up rubbing lots of viewers the wrong way.
SJW propaganda despite still allowing anime, manga, and Asian live actions films and shows with attractive/sexualized women or Rule 34 and other things they really hate on their site.
- The most notable example of this is when they got a license for Interspecies Reviewers, an anime about a man who reviewed various monster girls brothels and prostitutes, which featured TONS of sexual content. It was thankfully pulled after 3rd episode.
It was one of the sites that caused the Goblin Slayer drama in 2018. For starters, the Goblin Slayer anime was rated TV-PG on Crunchyroll, which is really low considering that the anime (and the manga at a higher degree) has depictions of slaughter, gore and rape by the goblins to the characters FROM THE VERY FIRST EPISODE. This error caused a lot of people who used Crunchyroll to watch the anime expecting, at worse, a generic isekai with mild violence, only to get shocked by the episode (mainly due to the depiction of rape even though it makes the goblins even more hateable instead of glorifying it) expressed their disgust on Twitter by discouraging people to watch it, some of which alleged to be traumatized by it.

Redeeming Qualities

They have fixed the video quality issue in 2018.
- They also now use an HTML5 video player that fixes many issues from the Adobe video player.
They are still a great site to watch anime, read manga, and also to watch live action films and shows.
As mentioned above, they decided to go legit.