the leap of doom

I took the plunge this last weekend and got myself a Crunchyroll subscription.

Currently I'm in the two-week free-trial period, but after that they start billing me $6.99 a month. I reckon should be about £4 a year, or it's probably best to think about it as £50 a year.

Now that's not cheap as such, but the point is to watch plenty of stuff in order that it starts to represent good value for money. My inaugural viewing under my subscription was the first four eps of Chi's New Address, which is a super-cute show about a young kitten.

Four episodes sounds a lot, but it's not that much, as each episode is only about 3 minutes long.

I've actually been a member of crunchyroll for ages - I joined slightly before it went legit, I think. I've also blogged about it before and I won't bother repeating my hatred of the site's structure and layout, the point is that I didn't really need to subscribe.

You can watch stuff on crunchyroll just by being a member. But the subscription gains you access to shows a week earlier and to a HQ version.

Now for me these are not necessarily the greatest of gains. Given my schedule, I don't generally have the spare time to follow shows in a fashion that would mean getting episodes a week earlier was a good thing. Also, when you add to that the fact that I actually prefer to watch shows in blocks, if not as whole seasons right through, then this really isn't a great gain.

The HQ versions are also not so useful.

For anyone that doesn't know, crunchyroll is a streaming site. Now, there appear to be two types of streaming - firstly, there's what I call 'pre-load' screening, which is how YouTube works.

You go to a video and it loads the video up once you press play. This gives you the option to pause the video and wait for it to load completely before starting. This is the best type of streaming if you're on a relatively slow connection like me.

Crunchyroll uses what I call iPlayer-style streaming. For this type of streaming, you simply get delivered what it is you're watching as you're watching it. So if you pause, it doesn't load up any more, it just waits until you press play again.

Now don't get me wrong, I love iPlayer and it's a system that does work for me. Just. If I'm watching iPlayer I can't do anything else on the interwebs. And it does have advantages - you can skip straight to where you want and it doesn't go bonkers, for example. I'd also guess it helps the company from a bandwidth point of view, as it's not sending you loads of stuff that you may then not watch because you closed the video or whatever.

The problem is that it's not as good as iPlayer. Even with a fair-wind, it can still stutter for me on the lower quality feeds. The higher quality therefore seems to be a constantly-stuttering nightmare. I'm guessing this has something to do with the relative size and quality of infrastructure available to the BBC compared to crunchyroll.

So why did I subscribe if these things aren't particularly beneficial to me?

Well, mainly because it means I'm contributing cash towards a hobby I love. The whole point of sites like this is that they're aimed at doing away with fansubs and all the illegality that involves.

It's a conscience saver, basically.

But there is also anther reason.

I was actually considering subscribing last year when loads of new shows were announced on crunchyroll. But the problem was that many of these, including some it turned out I really liked, were not licensed for anywhere other than the US.

This meant I couldn't watch them. And that really annoyed me.

Well this year there are even more shows are available on crunchyroll. Plus, more of them appear to be available in the UK (as far as I can work out only 2 of the new season shows aren't available in the UK), so I decided to subscribe and to actively try to watch stuff on there.

Of course the region problem remains, in general. If you go here then all the stuff in light grey is not available in the UK (assuming, that is, you're in the UK - if not, light grey still means not available in your region, but I've no idea how many there will be, if any).

But at least there's plenty I can watch now.