Yesterday I ran into trouble signing up for my account-- it wasn't processing credit cards right –but the problem was fixed impressively quickly and I signed up last night. For the record, by the way, I was told that the service is supposed to be $6.95 per month; I was charged an extra $0.57 in tax that resulted in it costing $7.52. It looks like they've already changed that. I wasn't able to start playing around until today, though!
They have a nice color-coded system for showing you what's availble to who. If an episode is available to everyone, period, it's a normal thumbnail; if it's for registered users only, it's shaded red, and if it's for premium (paid) users only, it's yellow. I like color-coding. I'm girly like that.
Unfortunately, I had a lot of difficulty with the player. I tried the episode in Safari, Firefox, and Opera on this Mac, and it would always wind up getting clippy after about 20 seconds. It would come back and be smooth for a bit by the end of the opening, but it would off and on run into this clippiness throughout the episode, making it very hard to watch. To make it worse, whenever it WAS in smooth mode, it had a small box in the middle, presumably informing me of how complete the buffering process was. So it was either super-clippy, or it had a little box in the middle, off and on through the entire episode.
I was concerned that it was a problem with my parents' Internet access-- their DSL setup is pretty old. So in order to make sure that I was giving the AN a fair shake I packed up the laptop and ran (literally!) to a wifi hotspot downtown. I tried the video in all three browsers and still had the same problem, in all three browsers.
That said, I do think the service has potential. The full-screen quality is decent, and I personally kinda like having things available in smaller boxes (so I can shove it off into a corner of the screen and have all the other stuff I'm doing along the sides. If they can fix whatever's causing the video to clip, I'll be pretty happy to have access to those materials, I think.
A few notes, however: pretty much everything on there is dub, so if you're a sub-only fan, right now it probably wouldn't be a great value. And of course, since ADV hasn't licensed a whole lot of anime super-recently, pretty much everything on here is available on DVD if you'd rather have it that way (and I'm sure ADV would love for you to buy those DVDs!). That said, I'm willing to bet the'yre hoping to put upcoming licenses on here, and those of us who want to try before we shell out for a DVD may be happy to get a cheaper chance to try stuff out. (Besides, if you haven't watched something yet, it's still as new to you as it could be.)
I'm also already hearing that it's as region-locked as anything. (Maybe it's just my unfortunately America-centric mind, but it seems odd to me that this continues to be a surprise.) I know at least one person in the UK signed up for an account and couldn't watch anything, and is currently trying to get a refund. No word yet on whether the refund is imminent.
So that's the important information, I think. If any of you have questions, further information, or just want to share a different experience, share it in the comments! (I'm still not-so-secretly hoping that the buffering problems are with me and not them!)
I find it rather annoying that publishers still claim that their titles arent licensed for the UK when in truth they are. FUNi recently tried to pull a similar stunt, saying most of their recent licenses were US/Canada only. However they were caught out in that lie when several UK publishers tried to get release licenses. They then changed their story to while the titles were licensed for the UK, they weren't planning to release or sub license for release there.
I find this damned annoying and counter productive. The UK has a large fansub scene which totaly ignores any and all license announcements. Why? Because of this. Why should they cease releasing a fansub of a series that's been licensed when the licensor wont release it here?
Bah went off on a tangent there hehe, the point i'm trying to make though is that the companies are region locking their digital sites purely on some other unknown reason, not because they aren't licensed for the UK. Point of Fact, i think only 2 funi titles licensed recently are NOT officially licensed for the UK, all the rest are. They simply choose not to release over here.
Region locking DVD's i can accept, to a degree, but lets face it whats the point of region locking a website? You license a series, go through all the trouble of subbing/dubbing it and then release it. Surely it would be common sense to allow the countries it is licensed for access to it. I mean lets say 500 people in the UK sign up, that would be an extra 3.5k a month (about$5k US), so surely ANY profit is better than no profit?
Also, i had an email from them saying my refund was being processed. On the plus side they were quick to admit the screwed up and got in touch rather quickly. But if the site is all dubs i'm glad i cant access it, i hate dubs!!
Not that I'm saying you're especially doing this, but a lot of fans just assume that because they see it on the North American end of things, that it's the NA companies' doing, when they may or may not have much say in the matters. ^^