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
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