First Anime Network and now Neon Alley as another anime channel bites the dust (the Funimation Channel may not be far behind).
Perhaps, I am from a different era, but I enjoyed the ability to tune in at random times (to the linear channel) to watch programming I would not have otherwise watched on a VOD platform. I have discovered many a series that way.
With VOD demand, the viewer is shown many, many titles and left trying to figure out what series to watch based on the attractiveness of a particular program's title card. (kind of like being in a video store from yesteryear). That is not how I prefer to watch anime and especially not on a computer screen.
I wish Neon Alley the best, but come April 1st my viewing options will switch to the occasional anime program aired on a random cable or satellite channel.
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venture2000 wrote: | Perhaps, I am from a different era, but I enjoyed the ability to tune in at random times (to the linear channel) to watch programming I would not have otherwise watched on a VOD platform. I have discovered many a series that way.
With VOD demand, the viewer is shown many, many titles and left trying to figure out what series to watch based on the attractiveness of a particular program's title card. (kind of like being in a video store from yesteryear). |
I grew up with that same era too, and bemoan the same fate of movies:
I used to channel-click into a classic movie on a local-station at all hours, have no idea what I was watching, and spend the next few years searching out that movie--Was always too young to stay up to watch the "late show", when all the 40's classics were airing, and while I always ended up stuck with a cable provider that made us PAY for Turner Classic Movies ( ), when I actually had the channel (and random MGM channel ThisTV), it was fun to tune in at random and see if I knew which movie was actually playing. Maybe I'd get my next favorite at Pot Luck.
Nowadays, NO movies before 1989 are playing on TV, there's no Pot Luck anymore, and we're stuck with the paradox you've noticed: You have to choose your own movie you've heard of, and to have heard of a movie, you have to have seen it. As a result, old movies are either kept carefully protected on disk, too expensive for stations to show, or studios assume we'd "rather" have the last five years' hits....As a result, nobody bothers to be curious, and there are kids in college who have literally never heard of the Marx Brothers, and can't imagine what a MGM musical is like, where people, like, sing in public.
But that's movies--Anime, where I don't know what I'm watching until I watch it, I'd rather have in a nice organized library, where I can pick shows and watch in sequence.
That, I'd compare to the days when PBS stations showed Classic Doctor Who at 7:30 or 11: You never tuned into episode 1 of a story, you got some synopsis at the beginning of what was supposed to be happening, and even then, you forgot to set your VCR and get the next night's episode.
Now that they're all on Amazon and Netflix, it's made for enjoying cover to cover like a library book--I'm not part of the whole new mindset that every series must be, quote, "binge-watched" from first episode to last, but with the story-arc plots of most anime series, being able to set my own schedule does HELP.
Quote: | That is not how I prefer to watch anime and especially not on a computer screen. |
(Oh, forgot you have the computer screen. I'd never even heard of NA or Crunchyroll, until they showed up as TV-screen PS3 apps.)
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