Crunchyroll has rolled out anime with hard subs (subtitles) as well as a new video player for select users in territories including Brazil and Colombia.
It would seem to me that Crunchyroll should prefer soft subs, since they require much less work and can be edited/updated/changed at any time. And it’s much easier and less costly to offer multiple languages, since they can just provide one video file and multiple sub files, rather than having to provide multiple videos.
And personally, I prefer hard subs - they’re no fuss, generally more dependably accurate (and accurately timed) and allow for more creativity, like strategic placement, multiple colors or fonts, deliberate variation in font size/kerning etc…
and allow for more creativity, like strategic placement, multiple colors or fonts, deliberate variation in font size/kerning etc…
Crunchyroll’s subtitle display system was actually really advanced and could do all this stuff anyways, making the move feel even stranger. My guess is they wanted to stop maintaining their own video player without dropping those capabilities.
I dunno… granted that I’m extremely cynical, that just doesn’t sound like corporate behavior. I would more expect CR to just count on exclusive licensing and the convenience of siccing governments on pirates to protect their market share from any possible ill effects of downgrading their player.
I mean - Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to specifically describe a process involving online platforms and a combination of private users and business customers, but really the broad process is common to pretty much every corporate product/service in existence, and undeniably including streaming services.
I think you’re indeed being a little too cynical here. Enshittification happens because corps are trying to squeeze every cent they can out of everyone they interact with. It’s not like they’re going out of their way to make things worse; that’s just an incidental thing that happens sometimes when a guy with an MBA sees a cost he thinks can be cut. In this case I think the target was a relatively expensive development team; any changes to how much work is put into translation and localization would be a separate matter.
Also keep in mind that they have some terrifying rivals - Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+. Each of these rivals has solid offerings in the anime world, and each of them has a deep warchest they could pull from if they wanted to fight Crunchyroll for exclusives. Up 'til now one of the biggest reasons to have a Crunchyroll account over those others has been (believe it or not) the quality of the subtitles. For all of Crunchyroll’s mistakes, those others do it far worse. If Crunchyroll actually dropped their subtitle quality and got rid of features like typesetting I think they’d lose a lot of customers. Oh, and I guess HiDive also exists. They’ll need to make some serious upgrades such as “a video player that plays videos consistently” or “a next episode button that actually plays the next episode” before they can threaten Crunchyroll though.
I think what is going on here is an anti-piracy measure. When subs are delivered in a separate stream in the browser, pirates with the proper tools can save them separately, making it easier to redistribute as a video file with a range of subtitle options. By hardcoding them, CR is basically making a prospective pirate’s redistribution life harder because they need to do a separate video for every sub language (or go to a different source).
I think the main thing that soft subs offers is that you can customize size/color options in the player. When they are hardsubs burned into the video, then you no longer have that ability.
That was my first thought, but it doesn’t seem to hold up. The only pirates I would think would be significantly inconvenienced are ones that are doing fansubs of languages CR doesn’t support. If it’s a language CR supports, then the only difference is that the pirates would offer hard subs instead of soft, and while yes, that does mean having to host multiple copies of the same video, each with their own hard subs, that seems more the sort of thing that CR wouldn’t do, since corporations will institute policies solely to save fractions of cents. Pirates, ironically enough, generally aren’t that greedy, so it seems they’d be more likely to just go ahead and host multiple copies of hard subbed videos if that’s what it takes, and that’s the way it goes.
Now that said, I had noticed over recent years that hard subs are increasingly rare and most sites only offer soft subs, but I just assumed that was because they were ripping them straight from the originals, while hard subs are still done the old fashioned way, by fansubbing groups. But I guess it’s possible that the fact that most of the pirates have gone to soft subs exclusively means it would be more of a hassle for them to handle hardsubs than I’m thinking it would be.
What am I missing?
It would seem to me that Crunchyroll should prefer soft subs, since they require much less work and can be edited/updated/changed at any time. And it’s much easier and less costly to offer multiple languages, since they can just provide one video file and multiple sub files, rather than having to provide multiple videos.
And personally, I prefer hard subs - they’re no fuss, generally more dependably accurate (and accurately timed) and allow for more creativity, like strategic placement, multiple colors or fonts, deliberate variation in font size/kerning etc…
Crunchyroll’s subtitle display system was actually really advanced and could do all this stuff anyways, making the move feel even stranger. My guess is they wanted to stop maintaining their own video player without dropping those capabilities.
I dunno… granted that I’m extremely cynical, that just doesn’t sound like corporate behavior. I would more expect CR to just count on exclusive licensing and the convenience of siccing governments on pirates to protect their market share from any possible ill effects of downgrading their player.
I mean - Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to specifically describe a process involving online platforms and a combination of private users and business customers, but really the broad process is common to pretty much every corporate product/service in existence, and undeniably including streaming services.
Again though, I’m extremely cynical…
I think you’re indeed being a little too cynical here. Enshittification happens because corps are trying to squeeze every cent they can out of everyone they interact with. It’s not like they’re going out of their way to make things worse; that’s just an incidental thing that happens sometimes when a guy with an MBA sees a cost he thinks can be cut. In this case I think the target was a relatively expensive development team; any changes to how much work is put into translation and localization would be a separate matter.
Also keep in mind that they have some terrifying rivals - Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+. Each of these rivals has solid offerings in the anime world, and each of them has a deep warchest they could pull from if they wanted to fight Crunchyroll for exclusives. Up 'til now one of the biggest reasons to have a Crunchyroll account over those others has been (believe it or not) the quality of the subtitles. For all of Crunchyroll’s mistakes, those others do it far worse. If Crunchyroll actually dropped their subtitle quality and got rid of features like typesetting I think they’d lose a lot of customers. Oh, and I guess HiDive also exists. They’ll need to make some serious upgrades such as “a video player that plays videos consistently” or “a next episode button that actually plays the next episode” before they can threaten Crunchyroll though.
Yeah - I’d have to say that I’m being too cynical, since I didn’t see anything there I’d disagree with.
And I hadn’t considered the scale of CR’s competition - that’s a good point.
But then we’re back to it not making sense…
Ah, you might be right about this. I hadn’t thought about them dropping support for the .ass sub format.
I think what is going on here is an anti-piracy measure. When subs are delivered in a separate stream in the browser, pirates with the proper tools can save them separately, making it easier to redistribute as a video file with a range of subtitle options. By hardcoding them, CR is basically making a prospective pirate’s redistribution life harder because they need to do a separate video for every sub language (or go to a different source).
I think the main thing that soft subs offers is that you can customize size/color options in the player. When they are hardsubs burned into the video, then you no longer have that ability.
That was my first thought, but it doesn’t seem to hold up. The only pirates I would think would be significantly inconvenienced are ones that are doing fansubs of languages CR doesn’t support. If it’s a language CR supports, then the only difference is that the pirates would offer hard subs instead of soft, and while yes, that does mean having to host multiple copies of the same video, each with their own hard subs, that seems more the sort of thing that CR wouldn’t do, since corporations will institute policies solely to save fractions of cents. Pirates, ironically enough, generally aren’t that greedy, so it seems they’d be more likely to just go ahead and host multiple copies of hard subbed videos if that’s what it takes, and that’s the way it goes.
Now that said, I had noticed over recent years that hard subs are increasingly rare and most sites only offer soft subs, but I just assumed that was because they were ripping them straight from the originals, while hard subs are still done the old fashioned way, by fansubbing groups. But I guess it’s possible that the fact that most of the pirates have gone to soft subs exclusively means it would be more of a hassle for them to handle hardsubs than I’m thinking it would be.
I dunno - it just seems odd, still.