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Crunchyroll Responds to Drop in Video Quality, Plans to Re-Encode Catalog

Media distribution service Crunchyroll provided a comment on recent user feedback on a drop in video quality for streaming catalog titles on Tuesday. The statement is as follows:

Crunchyroll is always working towards serving the highest possible video quality to our users. To keep up with our growing audience and the many ways people are consuming anime, we've been working on a new infrastructure to better support viewing.

Last weekend, new episodes were released through the new infrastructure to test the system's ability to serve video to large portions of the Crunchyroll audience. The encodes that some users experienced were not up to the standards of our previous system, nor up to the standards we demand from ourselves. While we identified issues with the encodes, solutions for a broad rollout require us to first move completely to the new infrastructure. Going forward, we have updated the video experience for simulcasts and new episodes within the new infrastructure. As the transition to this new infrastructure is complete, we will re-encode all of our catalog with this higher quality.

Please know that it will never be Crunchyroll's intention to lessen the viewing experience. In cases like this we're grateful users reached out to us and provided feedback about the issue. We appreciate the patience with our efforts and will continue working to bring an improved viewing experience across Crunchyroll.

Beginning on Saturday, Crunchyroll received feedback following claims that the bitrate in some episodes had dropped.

Update: Crunchyroll has since updated its statement. Among other changes, it added this excerpt:

This means you will experience an improved encode for future releases on the new infrastructure, which will no longer use the lower quality encodes after any amount of time. For anyone who wants further technical detail on our encodes, our engineers will be releasing a blog post shortly.

Thanks, Millhi