Thursday, 22 October 2009

a little more on the roll

'the roll' meaning Crunchyroll, that is.

I basically forgot to mention this on Tuesday, but the thing I'd quite like Crunchyroll to have more of is downloadable content.

As I mentioned, the streaming thing is not always the best option for me, but if I was able to download episodes that would be great.

I wouldn't even mind if they were relative small files (as in the video size - pixel width and height) or lower quality, I'd just much prefer that as a method of delivery to streaming. It would give me the flexibility that fansub downloads give me, and if this is really meant to be a fansub 'killer' I don't see any other way it can achieve that.

Which isn't to say that you can't download stuff on Crunchyroll. There are several series where you can download episodes. The difficulty with these is that you have to effectively buy the episodes. On some of them it's actually done as a 'donation', which is a bit of a weird phrase, because it's a mandatory donation :/.

The problem there is a bit chicken and egg - I don't know what the dl is going to be like, so it's risky to pay for it. While, as mentioned, I'm happy that free dl's could be poor quality and small files, if I'm paying directly for it, then I'd prefer to get a good product.

This is made a little worse with some of the show's streaming having expired, so now you can't even sample the show via streaming to see if it's worth buying.

In other words, it seems to me there's still some way to go before Crunchyroll truly becomes a 'pirate breaker'. Plus of course they'd need to have all the new shows on there, and I can't ever see that happening, though I guess could be possible if other companies offered other shows via different routes.

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