Before online streaming, there was Toonami
Long, long ago before the internet came along, the only way to watch anime was on VHS tapes or cable. Years have gone by and they started to appear on DVDs while the internet kept getting better and better. Now in the 21st century we are able to watch anime online with the simple click of a button. Why is online streaming such a good thing for anime? Well, because of online streaming new people can discover the world of anime, like myself. I’ve been a fan of anime since the early days of Toonami featuring
Dragon Ball Z,
Rurouni Kenshin, and other great shows. With online streaming available, it does have many positive things that I love, but it has some negatives as well.
The first thing I love about online streaming is the number of websites where I can watch the shows I love.
FUNimation,
VIZ,
Crunchyroll, and
Hulu are some of the major websites that help people like me watch their shows easily. The second thing I love about it is all the great selection of shows to watch. They have old shows that you may not be able to view on TV anymore like
Gundam (on Crunchyroll) to new (and current) shows like
Naruto Shippuden on Hulu. Another great thing is that I can watch new shows like
School Rumble. The best thing about online streaming, though, is being able to watch them whenever I want. For free.
Thanks to online streaming I now love School Rumble
While I do love online streaming for anime, there are some negatives to it. First is the selection of titles on the publisher's website. While sites like FUNimation do have have many streaming shows available, there are also many popular titles missing like
Dragon Ball Z. If you want to check out certain shows, you either have to buy the DVDs or try to find fan subs. The second thing that bums me out is the quality. While there are good steaming quality sites out there like Hulu, usually it’s not DVD quality. Plus with HD anime coming out, you can only watch HD shows on Blu Ray or on Crunchyroll. With good quality, you will also need a solid internet to watch shows without any disturbances. Third is that not everything is free to watch. There are anime streaming websites that offer paid subscriptions like
Crunchyroll and
The Anime Network. To watch some shows you have to subscribe to their service and for a guy like me who is low on money, it’s a bummer. Even with these negative things about online streaming, though, I will keep on watching anime this way for a long time.
Online streaming is a fantastic way to watch anime and stay current. There are great things about it like being able to watch anime whenever and discovering new shows that you end up loving. While there some negatives like low quality, the pros greatly outweigh the cons. All in all, online streaming offers me hours of entertainment and I will continue to use the service.
- - JJOR64 is a long time Anime Vice user and maintains a very active
blog on the site. - -
As for your opinions in the article. I must say the pros most certainly do not outweigh the cons for one big reasons, region lockouts. Most legal ways of watching streaming anime are locked away completely from most of the world, or has ridiculousness restrictions on how and what we can watch. I realize why it is done, but until they fix this glaring problem streaming anime is not going to be as big as you make it out to be. Unless of course you are lucky enough to be in the select minority with access to it. When a service, no matter how great it may be, is not available in over 90% of the world it cant really be considered "a fantastic way to watch anime and stay current", as you put it.
As for streaming anime in general, I'm still not a big fan of it when given the option. From watching anime on the few places that do allow it legally, and the illegal streaming sites too, I always found it to be a hassle. In order for it to be really streaming the quality needs to be degraded to such a low level it's almost unwatchable most times, and to get a half way decent quality you have to Que it up and wait for the whole thing to finish downloading before you start to watch it; hardly streaming in my opinion. When it's still more convenient to pop in a DVD that you bought/rent/stole from a little kid in the park, or "obtaining" your anime by simply leaving bit torrent on while you sleep at night for a day or two you can have access to high quality anime that you can: watch at anytime, with no annoying pop ups, no subscription fees, no worrying about if/when a show will not be available anymore, bad video/sound quality, wondering if the service has all of the episodes of the show you want to watch, or even if it has that particular show in general.
Streaming has a lot of obstacles to over come before it can be considered a viable way to watch anime for most people, as it's only good for a small percentage of people out there. Until they take into account all of the much easier and more convenient ways for people to watch anime, and work on making streaming a more realistic choice to watch anime over all the other ways offered, it's not go to be all that viable of a means for companies to distribute their products.
That's the thing. You have the option to deal with the issues. Most people don't even get that choice.
But if it was not for streaming I would not have discovered school rumble (Harima and Yakumo are my favs on the show) and I love it. I watch nearly all of my anime online since the only anime that comes on in my part of North America is Ani-Monday and Saturday night/ Sunday morning on adult swim. I didnt get to watch anime when I was younger since a. I didnt have cable and b. I had dial up ( I used to think 56kbs was fast). But now that I pay for both myself I get to enjoy plenty of great shows.
In the old days there were no streams, subtitles, or even dubs. If you didn't know Japanese you scoured a BBS on your 2400 baud dial-up modem-equipped Commodore 64 and printed out a timestamped script some guy in LA or UC Berkeley or Stanford typed up and then followed along. Lots of pauses and rewinds on that tape deck if you missed a line or lost your place. You'd get the cassettes either by trading/borrowing with fellow fans or getting lucky at a Chinatown video store. It was all a messy and inexact science. Your friends would come over and all-night parties would commence in the basement over 24-packs of Coke and metric tons of powdered donuts and pizza.
Those were the early days of my fandom. Streaming titles is pretty much magic to me. You can not imagine how many more options you have now compared to the late 80s and early 90s.
And this is only the beginning. There will be a point in the near future when one can veg away an entire summer streaming titles into a computer. Your limbs will literally atrophy because there will be little reason to get up during these marathon sessions. The future means investing in bedpans.
For most people in more densely populated areas, the connection speeds aren't usually a problem, I lived in the upper peninsula of Michigan which has an entire population less than several of the cities in the lower part(not combined, just alone). I lived about 100 yards from where I could get a 5 meg connection as the slowest and instead had about a 768kbps connection. To stream, I had to queue up several episodes and wait for several hours.
The old days were definitely immensely harder... and as someone who just missed them, it sounds AWESOME!!! The way everyone from the old BBS and VHS days describes it, it sounds like a super rad treasure hunt! I know it was a pain in the ass, but man, it sounds cool as hell! Kind of Indiana Jones-like!
I envy your experience!
I bet you had to walk 20km in the freezing cold and snow (or blazing heat and high humidity) to get to said Chinatown as well only to have to wait 2 hours, while you dipped in and out of hypothermia (or hyperthermia) only to buy what you could quickly before the police cracked down on purchasing of illegal tapes. Am I close?
@Boddington: Hey gramps, do you have to get off the porch to heckle the kids, or can you do it just fine from there. As an early 90's child of the anime revolution, VHS is as far back as I go, and I have no desire to reflect fondly (@Papasan: ) At such concepts ever again.
My one, and only complaint about streaming is that it entirely discourages me from perusing things that are not. As JJOR said, many, many things are not streaming... and while I know I should watch them... when it comes down to it, the streaming objects are a click-away.
Though I do not lament how this cuts down on having to hunt down the elusive, out of print DVDs, or just small production orders. It took me weeks to find a copy of Princess Tutu, and I'm still lacking a full set of Utena discs.