Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - How to Watch Anime on a Budget
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Flash33
 Posts: 78 Location: Florida |
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The lack of available options for a reasonable price is exactly why more people are turning to piracy, as why pay $20 for only a small handful of shows when I can get a much wider variety of shows for free? Yes supporting the creators would be nice to do, and I'm sure if people could they would, but not everyone can afford to do so, especially when the platforms hosting said shows don't have enough incentives to do so.
There's also the issue of quality preservation. When a show inevitably gets taken off the platform you have to hope someone recorded it and uploaded it online in good quality and with a good sub and/or dub that's accurate/faithful (preferably both if possible). It's for these reasons why I've been pirating shows for years, as not only is the library bigger and better but the quality often is as well, and at least for the main site I use the devs are pretty good at handling any issues that come up with shows both old and new in a timely manner. It's not perfect but it's better than nothing. Bottom line: if streaming platforms like CR want us to use them then they need to give us an actual solid reason to do so beyond "here's a small list of our most popular shows and nothing else". Otherwise we just won't. Last edited by Flash33 on Tue Jun 25, 2024 8:29 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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Piglet the Grate
 Posts: 797 Location: North America |
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You can borrow almost anything that has had a physical media release at your local library through inter-library loan within a week or two of requesting it.
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gsilver
Posts: 654 |
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Some anime are showing up on official Youtube channels, too.
I watched Atashin'chi back in college through other means, and the other means never finished it. Years later, an official Youtube channel opened and is well into subbing the entire show. |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4631 Location: New York |
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FAST channels have a lot of older stuff if you don’t mind linear.
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4660 |
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Yeah, I could see stuff from around those partnership days simply winding up elsewhere. If CR/Funi couldn't tell for sure whether they still had rights to it, it's probably not worth it, and someone else can scoop it for a lot less.
Tubi isn't bad, and at least is straight forward in what it gets you. You can watch, there will be ads, and that's it. A friend and I were at a convention recently and spent the night at his parents' house. They, obviously, didn't have any anime streaming service, and it would have been a hassle to try to use my phone to login and try to cast something. Instead, we just loaded Tubi from their TV and put on some Lupin. |
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Ggultra2764
 Subscriber Posts: 3976 Location: New York state. |
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The only rationale I could justify getting a paid subscription for a streaming service is if I'm going to make regular use of it. But with streaming have the setbacks where titles can be on separate services depending on rights issues between companies to rack up on costs, the titles not guaranteed to be on the sites forever depending on licensing terms, and being pretty fussy with what titles I choose to stick with nowadays, I can't justify blowing money on getting a monthly subscription just for a few simulcasts I watch weekly.
At least in regards of supporting the industry, I still buy physical media up for titles of interest to support the industry where financially feasible. But if the titles in question are only available on a paid streaming service, long out of print, requiring me to pay an arm and a leg to snag it like with Aniplex of America's stuff, or not available via any legal means whatsoever, then sorry. I don't regret going through not-so-legal means to get what I want to check out. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13626 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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What gets me is when you are doing a paying subscription and still get the ads being played. Hulu is really guilty of this. Even if the base price for a Hulu subscription was $6.95/month now or then, we don't want to be seeing ads. If it is where you are watching the show on an official stream without a paying subscription, the ads are understandable.
Also, regardless of why it happens, it sucks that region-blocks continues to exist. Now, if it is a show that says "worldwide minus China and Japan", sure. |
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Glordit
 Posts: 685 |
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I honestly can't complain. I pay about ~$2 for Crunchyroll. ~$9 for Netflix and can get D+ for about ~$7 which I sometimes do if I want to binge a few shows there. Less than $20 a month for 3 subs and I can get 90% of my anime and then some, is a pretty good deal.
Too bad Hidie is no longer available, they weren't terrible expensive when they were here (from what I remember it was about the equivalent of $9 a month) but compared to other services and that they offered it wasn't extremely competitive. |
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gsilver
Posts: 654 |
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The biggest thing that gets me is that in the US, stuff that's available on Disney+ elsewhere is stuck on Hulu.
There's just no way I'm sitting through ads, which makes it $18 a month extra for just one show that's on a service that I'm already paying for but live in the wrong country. That is just absurd. |
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VirgilTB4
 SubscriberPosts: 14 |
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My concern is if Crunchyroll is starting to take up the same policy as Netflix (for shows that Netflix fully owns) of keeping popular shows as streaming only with no plan to ever do a physical release.
An example is 3 seasons of "Laid Back Camp" that they've invested in dubbing but have yet to state any plans to release to physical media. Crunchyroll probably has licensed the physical media rights but, like Netflix, keeping something streaming only forces you to keep paying monthly. |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5522 |
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At present, I'm not doing too bad, I pay for CR, Amazon Prime and Hidive, and use my sister's Disney+ and her boyfriends Netflix.
I'm mixed on physical media, on one hand, it's great that after the initial cost, it's always there for me to watch, it won't be removed or on a service that I don't have. And then there is the ease of use and the bonus material, though you do get a lot less these days. On the other hand, there are titles that I brought years ago, watched once, and now they just take up shelve space. With streaming, you can watch a title once, never touch it again(I haven't watched Soul Eater in over a decade), and depending on how many titles you watch on that service per year, it could only cost you pennies. |
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Eilavel
Posts: 136 |
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I occasionally have reason to specifically use youtube as a platform. Theres actually a fair amount of licenced material on there available legit, if its a priority for you (listings for channels not complete & are probably regional):
Anime on TMS- Space Adventure Cobra, Lupin the 3rd Nozomi Entertainment- Martian Successor Nadesico, Irresponsible Captain Tylor Gundam Info- already listed, but it often has other stuff up (comes and goes)- currently Seed is available, for example. Old kids shows like Beyblade, Monster Rancher ect are often also legally about as they are mainly adverts anyway. |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4555 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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A lot of us old-timers were members of anime clubs back in the day where we would watch (and even borrow) VHS fansubs without ever having to go on the Internet. Personally, I didn't even get access to the Internet until about a year after joining an anime club. I mean, obviously, yeah, the distribution of VHS fansubs to the clubs was mainly organized through e-mail and USENET plus the rudimentary early web, but having to deal directly with fansubbing groups was mostly limited to the one or two people who ran each club. ------------------- On a completely different tangent more relevant to the current era, I sometimes buy anime DVDs and even Blu-Rays from thrift stores for only a few dollars each. I picked up Time of Eve on Blu-Ray at a Value Village (a.k.a. Savers) thrift store a few months ago. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6902 Location: Kazune City |
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This is the real key here, and it's important to maintain that perspective. Though it should be noted that the usual MSRP ~20 years ago was $30 per DVD, not $20. And adjusted for inflation (June 2004 --> May 2024), that's around $50 in today's dollars. So if you bought a DVD every month in 2004, you'd be spending $600 in today's dollars, for approximately 48 episodes -- or one 4-cour show, two 2-cour shows, or four 1-cour shows. And this would be for DVD releases coming out 1-3 years after the JP airing. If you spent $50 a month today on streaming, that'd be about enough for Crunchyroll. HiDive, Netflix, and Disney+, netting you virtually every airing anime, a substantial (albeit not as complete as we'd like) anime back catalogue, AND a good amount of Western/mainstream entertainment content. So even with the dreaded "multiple subscriptions," legal anime is still far cheaper and faster than it used to be. I don't expect anyone to be a perfect angel who subscribes to every service and never pirates anything (because I certainly am not), but there's a lot of middle ground between "pay for everything" and "pay for nothing." And it's not like subscribing to one or more legal services somehow limits you to watching only what's on it/them, or from pirating anything.
Setting aside the presence of legitimate distributors (like AnimEigo, ADV, Central Park Media, etc.) selling licensed VHS tapes in the early 90s, I don't believe that's how the VHS fansub scene worked. Afaik, the Platonic-ideal model was that once you made contact with a fansub distributor (via the early Internet, fanzines, clubs, conventions, or "some guy whose second cousin served on a military base in Okinawa"), you'd mail blank VHS tapes in a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope (including return postage) to them, they would copy the content you requested, then mail the tapes back to you, without money changing hands. Of course, there were less-ethical distributors out there, as 2003!Zalis found out after ordering VHS copies of files for a show that could've been downloaded for free at snail's-pace via BitTorrent and burned on to CD-R to avoid filling >50% of my then-current desktop hard drive. Good times! |
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Kiwi93
Posts: 404 |
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With streaming services all getting expensive I’ve canceled a few except for Crunchyroll, Hidive and YouTube Premium. YouTube and anime is all I really watch now so I’m fine with just those services and if an anime I want to watch is not on CR or Hidive I just sail the high seas. I just can’t justify paying for Netflix and Hulu for the few anime exclusives they have when I don’t care for most of their catalog and I refuse to pay for ad tiers.
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