// a blog! bits and pieces of life

Money-eating commercial entities.

Uzumaki Naruto

The Naruto anime series used to be extremely popular, with dedicated Fan Subbers such as Dattebayo, AnimeHaven, and some others which I cannot remember. In fact, there were often more than hundreds of thousands of downloads for each episode released. It's probably one of the longest lasting anime so far.

Recently, Crunchyroll, a video sharing website, had ventured into an Anime distribution kind of entity. It tied up with Anime producers to release episodes on Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll also released a new kind of membership, the Anime Membership, which supposedly allowed you to watch HD quality anime episodes at a cost of roughly S$10/month.

Viz Media, the corporation handling Naruto releases, partnered with Crunchyroll to release episodes on the video sharing website as well. And this led to Dattebayo, one of the longest Naruto fansubbers, to cease fansubbing the series.

The demonstration video that Crunchyroll offered to preview its HD quality videos, led hundreds, if not thousands of users to purchase the Anime Membership, in the faith that they will be given the same quality in the subsequent releases. However, they were wrong.

Crunchyroll had switched to an alternative form of video provision. Instead of pre-loading the whole video before playback, the videos were now streamed off the server. This was supposedly in retaliation to video thefts. But what a big mistake they have made, and what a disappointment it has been to viewers like myself.

The videos now load awfully slow, and there isn't any stable streaming either. More popular series like Naruto had much more viewers, and this perhaps led to an even slower loading of the episodes. Wonderful, Crunchyroll, well done. Users pay S$10 per month to experience such unacceptable streaming. So what if the videos are in HD? There's no point if users cannot even stream them to begin with.

Besides, the subtitles made for Naruto were now subbed by Viz Media, and I have to say, the quality of the subs are terrible. There are many japanese phrases that are best left in their literal form, and I don't really think they ought to be over-translated for the sake of education. For example, 'ero-sennin' had its unique flavour to it. Viz Media had to so wonderfully translate it to 'Pervy Sage'. It doesn't even hold a single bit of the original uniqueness.

In fact, I think more than 3/4 of Crunchyroll videos had been taken down or something; they just aren't there anymore. Now why is this so? I have no idea, still. Nonetheless, the current experience up to now has left me utterly disappointed in Crunchyroll. I'm not going to pay for the Anime Membership anymore, and it's high time I find another source of my Anime.

Sorry Crunchyroll, you've failed many of us members.