Crunchyroll has faced backlash after voice actor David Wald revealed the company has been illegally opening and distributing his fan mail for the past five years, violating U.S. federal law regarding obstruction of correspondence. This revelation sparked widespread outrage, highlighting Crunchyroll’s questionable practices, including its monopoly over anime distribution in the West following its acquisition by Sony. Critics argue that Crunchyroll has become complacent, exemplified by the failure of its original content and a significant price increase for subscriptions. Furthermore, Wald’s situation underscores broader issues within the company, such as alleged discrimination against voice actors and a toxic work environment. Crunchyroll’s response has been inadequate, stating they are investigating the matter but failing to acknowledge their responsibility. This incident adds to the growing list of grievances against Crunchyroll, raising concerns about the treatment of voice actors and the future of anime distribution.
Why do folks hate crunchyroll here so much? I’ve been torrenting anime before like everyone else, but a couple years gap later I have found it more convenient to pay $9/mo or whatever and watch shows interchangeably on TV, PC, tablet and phone. I get it, I could do this using self-hosting with various tools, but all those have an upfront cost for a media server and time invested in figuring out how I can make it all work seamlessly on a 2017 LG TV, an iPhone, Linux and a shitty Samsung tablet, plus potentially subscription fee for seed box and/or VPN as well. Whereas crunchyroll just works and if I get tired of anime again, I’ll just cancel the service.
The only thing I don’t like about crunchyroll is the lack of dubbed kids shows.
I buy almost exclusively physical media. I don’t care about streaming so crunchy roll was just a thing I ignored. Then they bought like everything… Funimation and Rightstuf/Nozomi being the largest. I use to have probably a grand on preorder with rightstuf at any point in time. Talking easily 10K+ a year. I haven’t bought a damn thing off crunchy roll’s site. I don’t care for the company and their site sucks. Which is saying something cause rightstuf’s site was slow and clunky but it was simple and got the job done. Crunchy roll’s store site is just a giant ad for their streaming service that they also happen to sell stuff on.
Also despise that I had to talk with customer support multiple times to get off their damn mailing lists that they just signed everybody up for because they converted rightstuf accounts. The ‘unsubscribe’ link in the email was broken…hell it’s probably still broken. Even though that violates laws…clearly they don’t care about those.
There’s another post above that explains why. Basically it’s a monopoly on anime streaming, and they’ve done a popular voice actor dirty by intercepting his mail, which opening someone else’s mail without permission is a federal crime, especially since they legit stole what was in the packages.
Then there’s the whole thing where Sony merged Crunchyroll and FUNimation and other services, eliminating the “buy once forever” digital streaming licenses on the other services.
“If buying isn’t owning…” and so on.
Beacuse crunchyroll consistently fuck ups. Its actually impresive. The god awful change to their site design that removed the ability to comment on videos and made it very netflix like ( which to be fair is quite good on tv , but horrible on pc ). The apparently pretty bad treatment of voice actors. Pretty bad originals apparently ( actually i only watched part of the aztec one and i dont remember why i stopped but the reviews generaly werent favorable for any of them ) . And to top it all you all in america have it good. In europe there is still heavy region locking and crunchyroll decided to block acces from all free vpns beacuse f* you ( they really could just pretend they dont exists but no ).
Back when I used it, Cruncyroll had terrible uptime and a much more limited list of shows. If they had reliable uptime, I might have actually subscribed. But not for something only up 3/4 weekends.
I stopped using it when they randomly put some shows I watching behind a paywall. I was fine with the ads, that I uhhh never saw for some reason, but once they started doing “pay to watch whole shows” I was out.
Entire Lemmy is like how r/piracy was on Reddit.