MIT Convergence Culture Consortium: Archives
- As a major portal for the community around Japanese animation, Crunchyroll has made a decision that reflects the current trends and behaviors of online television.
- Crunchyroll.com has a strange history: it began as a host for fansubbed episodes of Japanese animation and Korean dramas, then in early 2009 the website partnered with Japanese companies to stream anime online in a timely manner from the initial Japanese release on TV. Over the past year, they're accumulated a strong community and developed business models around a subscription service for high-quality streaming video and exclusive content. Most of the video, however, is offered in standard-quality, free of charge, spanning most of their series, which tended to include every episode. The success of the unlimited, free business model seems unclear, as the portal recently began to take down certain videos after a stated period (but most likely spurred by the Japanese producers).
- Crunchyroll had implemented a download-to-own service into its three-part business model (ad-supported free streaming, subscription, and DTO). However, after today's announcement, it seems that Crunchyroll will be eliminating the DTO service in favor of a pure streaming model.
- if Crunchyroll's predictions are true -- that "online streaming video is the future" -- I wonder how much of this reflects the cultural practices of watching television to which anime fans have become acclimated, especially now that a subset of younger fans have grown up watching anime primarily via online platforms. Perhaps the move toward online streaming represents a shift in the anime fandom, in which fans no longer want to own media, but merely consume online (with potential negative effect to an industry that has relied on sales of physical media for the past few decades).
Following our discussion in class, I feel like we need to bring things back to the economics and history that underpins the concept of "creative commons". This poem is as old as capitalism itself, at the dawn of the era in which the private property and its development became equated with the drive for innovation.
We live in a time when the "creative commons" are being contested, and the walls are closing in...- - By Dan O'Reilly-Rowe
- The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
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