Forum - View topicNEWS: Amazon Shuts Down Anime Strike Paid Streaming Service
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Chrono1000
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As a fan of dubs this is wonderful news and while I have nothing against Amazon almost every decision they made with Anime Strike was wrong. Amazon never really did understand the anime market and it looks like they never will.
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Utsuro no Hako
Posts: 1046 |
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Of course I don't mean the entire year. I mean for the month of January, which Amazon charged me for YESTERDAY. |
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xchampion
 Posts: 370 Location: Idaho Falls, Idaho |
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I know I'm in the minority but I actually liked anime strike and thought the service was great. Now it's even better that it's apart of regular prime. It's a win-win for everyone. I hope they continue to license anime too.
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everapril
 Posts: 112 |
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Good. If they couldn’t sell me, a prodigious Amazon product and app user and rabid anime fan on their service, I don’t think they had much hope.
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2476 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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Well, I don't imagine I'm the only one here whose Winter queue now consists of all the stuff I couldn't watch last year: Scum's Wish, Princess Principal, Re: Creators, and so on.
I'd love to see this show up someday as a biz school case study in how to beat Amazon (or how Amazon beat itself). Amazon has never given a shit about the products it sells, only how it sells them (Bezos never liked books, he just wanted to create an online store for something, and books had various properties that made them a good place to start). For a market like streaming anime, with a very engaged and demanding community, Amazon's stand-offish "nice market you have here, we'll take it" attitude was poisonous. It reminds me of something Crunchyroll's management said at Crunchyroll Expo last year: asked about how they deal with competition, they replied "hey, how's everyone enjoying Anime Strike Expo and Netflix Expo just down the street?" Crunchyroll might well have lost money running their own con, but the engagement with and goodwill of the community was worth it. With Anime Strike, it just felt like a huge, faceless, clueless corporation trying to take over the industry, and fans wanted none of it. I do think there's room for competition for the anime fan's money, but just copying Crunchyroll isn't it. For example, you know what would be great? A service that offers pay-per-view livestreaming or time-shifts of major Japanese / anisong / idol concerts, Nico Nico style. That Love Live Sunshine concert film last year was just the Japanese livestream, shown in North American theaters a month later with no subtitles, for $35 (and still we had about 100 people where I saw it). I bet you could make a business streaming that stuff directly to viewers, and it would compliment the existing streaming marketplace, rather than try to just steal the existing value that's been created. Last edited by invalidname on Fri Jan 05, 2018 1:12 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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pi8you
 Posts: 172 Location: Minneapolis |
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From the email I just got from them: "If you have service remaining from your last billing cycle, a pro-rated refund will be issued to the payment method you used. Refunds are usually processed within two to three business days." |
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everapril
Posts: 112 |
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Good. If they couldn’t sell me, a prodigious Amazon product and app user and rabid anime fan on their service, I don’t think they had much hope.
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scowler
 Posts: 93 |
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The downside of this is, I can watch Amazon on the PS4, but I still can't watch HIDIVE on the PS4, so therefore no subscription there. When is HIDIVE PS4 app going to be released?
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SejinPK
Posts: 129 |
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This is probably a pretty unpopular opinion, but I'm not terribly happy with this news. Yes, Amazon Strike had some big problems, and yes, now there's only one paywall. However, that remaining paywall is the ~$100/year Prime membership that you have to pay for all at once, rather than the ~$60/year Anime Strike fee that you pay monthly, and can cancel and renew for particular seasons if you want (meaning it could be less than ~$60/year).
I would've preferred Amazon make the move of separating Anime Strike from Prime, as that would've made it just as accessible to people as something like Crunchyroll. Something else I'm curious about is why people think that the quality of Amazon's streaming videos will magically improve just because they got rid of Anime Strike. Nobody's said that directly, but from the complaints people are airing here that's the sense I get. I'm pretty tired right now, though, so I could be misreading. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Just for "the new Anime Streaming thing". Amazon has already spun Prime off into its own branded service, and still intends to shape their new market around double-paywalls for other splinters and the cable channels-- Especially struggling cable channels like Starz or Showtime that would like to move their entire business to streaming, without having to maintain a working service themselves.
Wait, it was available? 
They coulda told us. But, being Amazon, and not heavily invested or experienced in the anime industry, they didn't bother. Which explains why it became such a quick casualty when fans didn't subscribe, PR blew up in their face, and licenses turned out to be more complicated than they thought. |
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Toonces
Posts: 113 |
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I'm guessing you know the answer yourself, but it was definitely this. If they were making money Strike would still be alive. They were also offering free manga monthly to lure people onto the service. Definitely not sad or surprised about this. The twitter account for Strike was down to a poorly timed bot (that didn't even include all of their seasonal stuff!), and I think it's very obvious at this point that Sentai and Amazon broke up. No point in maintaining the service if you'll only barely try. They should've had all the anime on regular Amazon Prime to begin with, but there it is. Looks like they're getting rid of some of their back catalogue too. They still have their own originals, the stuff they helped Sentai get, some Aniplex stuff, and then some miscellaneous stuff; but you can see some stuff is gone now.
This was an error that most people either didn't know or didn't bother to correct, but you only needed Amazon Video to get Anime Strike. That means you only had to pay $4.99 monthly on top of $10.99 monthly. It was still stupid and a double pay wall, but I don't think you ever had to pay over $100. For the record, the fact that Amazon did not make that super clear is a failure on their part. I never had any issue with the video quality. Occasionally they were late to upload videos or had not uploaded subs. When notified they were usually on top of it, but could be slow without explanation. This was an issue way back when Kabaneri was airing, and I doubt this will fix or change the issue. |
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Utsuro no Hako
Posts: 1046 |
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Yeah, I just got the email now. It might've been smart of them to send it out before making the change, though. |
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1119 Location: Puget Sound |
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Yeah, that's the elephant in the room most people aren't talking about. HiDive is still out there, still getting exclusives, and still limited in the number of devices it's available on. Basically, unless you can cast, or have a TV that runs mobile apps, you're limited to mobile devices. For all it's faults, Strike was about as widely available as you could get. |
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Chrono1000
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meruru
Posts: 474 |
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For those of us paying for prime already, it was pretty maddening that we also had to pay an extra fee if we wanted anime strike. I think the most ideal situation would have been that anime strike comes free with prime, but you could also choose to subscribe to only anime strike. Oh well. |
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