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bonecrusher2102
onoesworkacct
How many customers watch each episode of popular shows? 100k+?
And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?
bonecrusher2102
I agree - this is the right take. Spend a little extra because your customers REALLY care.
programjames
I think the take is: If 100k people watch the episode, spending $200 more for higher quality subtitling comes out to... a whopping 0.2 cents per person (per episode). Let's just say that would cost an extra $1/month per person. Are they price sensitive enough that they won't go to a competitor that's a few dollars more expensive per month if it has better subtitles? I don't know, but maybe some manager believed they were, and thus it was worth it to make the subscription a little cheaper.
subpariaH
I just wish that there were versions of closed captioning that were fan-made and kept. There are movies that I watch over-and-over again that have bad subtitles, and I can do nothing about it. This is a travesty for the hearing-impaired, and the only good thing about it is that on occasion a film may have Easter eggs in their subtitles or things from the script that didn’t make it into production.
kace91
That person would need, besides basic computer fluency for the timestamps, knowledge of Japanese and English.
Not unheard of, but probably harder than hiring for a call center, and more need to prevent high rotation due to difficulty in finding replacements.
Edit: not that I disagree with your general idea, just pointing out potential issues.
bonecrusher2102
It’s cheaper than you might think. Much like in gaming, there’s a lot of people who really want to work in the anime industry, even if it’s just on the localization and distribution side. This drives down salaries quite a bit.
throwaway92rw
Wouldn't it be easier to just hire someone in Japan who knows English? Im sure they could find someone willing to work remotely.
whywhywhywhy
You’re not competing with them being unable to watch it either. You’re competing with someone doing a better job for free out of passion.
SecretDreams
While I agree, it's all a our whether they can pass the cost off to the customer. Customers will care a lot for food quality - will they tolerate a price increase to preserve sub quality or accept lower quality for the same sub price? Are there competitors?
These are the questions that would get played out in the decision process.
lasc4r
Reminds me of products on Amazon with little to know information about the product and photoshopped images. Somehow it was worth making, but selling? Who can be bothered.
alwaysdoit
TBF, for the more popular shows, they are spending that money on an English dub (which is considerably more expensive).
DrewADesign
This is really what’s driving business AI products’ push by fleece vest set, though: knowing that they can make enshitification just that much more attractive.
elihu
...and that's for an episode that probably cost the original studio at least a hundred thousand dollars to produce, maybe a lot more.
jasonwatkinspdx
Back in the 90s I attended an anime club where the main host had an amiga with genloc to generate subtitles, and we watched all the anime classics up to that era. The host had a basic understanding of Japanese while not being fluent, but it was good enough that he'd download and retime fansubs. He also funded his own translations with a couple local exchange students.
Even with stuff at this hobby/mature level, the difference in someone actually taking care with the subtitles is not even close to subtle. It makes a huge difference.
asimovDev
I love stories like this. I wish my school still had clubs when I was a student. My computer science teacher was speaking fondly of having doom and quake lan parties in the computer class in the evenings for students and teaching staff and even apparently some parents.
jasonwatkinspdx
The club I mentioned above was just hosted out of a guy's house. The original group new each other through a comic book shop, basically the only place in town that sold manga back then.
The host was an air force officer that'd been stationed in Okinawa for a while and fell in love with anime there. When he came back to the states he got friends to buy and ship him laserdiscs of anime from Japan on a regular basis, and showing those to friends gradually became the club.
Fun enough we'd host lan parties pretty often too. This was back when you had to daisychain coax ethernet, and one person having to leave meant everything had to shut down for a bit lol.
In the pre broadband era there was this sort of local collaboration in a way that I miss, but I'm also not blinded to the negatives of that era. Like the anime club had some very enthusiastic loli fans that with the benefit of adult hindsight were way past the creep line and definitely had a chilling effect.
a1o
Wait, are schools with no clubs now? What do people do to fill all the time?
matheusmoreira
> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”
Cannot overstate this enough. Fans are the ones who actually care. To an almost pathological degree.
Anime fansubbing is a major reason why our video players even have excellent subtitling support to begin with.
Many music fans will obssess over ripping quality and lossless encodings to the point of delusion.
I've seen people care so much about some film they they somehow spliced together two different blu-rays to make the ultimate version because some parts were better on the disc from a specific region.
Star Wars fans cared so much they spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to resurrect negatives from the 70s that even the creator himself had disowned:
https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/Project-4K77/
Always bet on guys who care. Corporations will never be able to compete. They simply do not give a shit. They want money for minimum viable products. These guys do it out of love.
ohmahjong
That's the first I've seen of 4k77 and related projects, thanks for sharing. A true labour of love.
a-french-anon
There's a direct equivalent in the world of anime: frame-per-frame restoration like the GITS Blu-Ray (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316985) or the '99 HxH anime and LaserDisc scans.
matheusmoreira
Absolute legend. I love this film.
inopinatus
The Rakuten/Viki model appears to lean into this and just sponsor fansub groups directly and include their output in the licensed stream.
At least one of the Chinese streaming services (I think possibly iQIYI) crowdsources improved translations directly in the app, presumably relying on the irritation factor of early adopters stuck with the MTL-grade int'l subs supplied by many C-drama production companies.
fifteen1506
I'm more than a Trekkie than a... Warrie (?), but does Project-4K77 means I can finally see Han shooting first?
Renevith
Yes! And you don't need to see Hayden Christensen's ghost at the Ewok party in episode 6, etc. They are a true gift.
buzer
From what I remember TheFluff was arguably one of the best timers (and encoders) in the fansub scene in the past and he could time the dialogue in under 10 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00xX0PwGUg8
Karaoke and typesetting can of course take longer (I remember someone complaining about how much effort it was to typeset every single book name in some scene that had a bookshelf) though karaoke is usually ~3 minutes of unique content (OP & ED) per ~12 episodes. Typesetting depends heavily on anime, like isekais don't usually have a lot Japanese writing anyway.
thaumasiotes
> I remember someone complaining about how much effort it was to typeset every single book name in some scene that had a bookshelf
That seems like something you might legitimately skip. Most books that appear in the background of a scene aren't relevant.
On the other hand, the example image in the article, where there's a big banner hung on the wall reading "Rana-chan's Surprise Party", seems like something you'd want to translate.
GoblinSlayer
I'm frankly puzzled by this meme. Only Bakemonogatari is sensitive to timing, and not in a good way, the rest is a matter of habit and taste, so you can't improve it.
timerol
> the rest is a matter of habit and taste, so you can't improve it
This statement is incorrect. All artistic endeavors are matters of habit and taste. You absolutely can improve at matters of taste
thaumasiotes
Viki is a platform to watch Asian TV with subtitles in various languages. Their policy on subtitles is, users are free to provide subtitles. Viki won't provide any itself. Their obligation begins and ends with making the video file available.
Each show is subtitled by a team of volunteers. (Generally one team per sub language.)
I watched 大江大河 ("Like a Flowing River"; the English name seems to have no particular relation to the Chinese name) on Viki. But between that series and the sequel (大江大河2), Viki lost the license to stream it.
So now both series are on YouTube, provided by some other party. Viki's subtitles are permissively licensed, so season 1 is up there still using the Viki subtitles.
Viki never got to show season 2, and the new publisher had to provide those subtitles itself. Unfortunately, they tend to be unintelligible gibberish. I was eventually able to watch season 2 after I found a set of fansubs on reddit.
I've noticed that Netflix and Amazon Prime now offer Korean dramas, and it made me wonder if that had something to do with Viki's struggles. But this wasn't even a Korean show.
On the topic of crunchyroll, they could fix their subtitle problems while spending less money by just moving to Viki's system.
koolba
> Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”
3-4 hours of time for a sub must be a rounding error for the production costs of these shows. No?
recursivecaveat
It's the kind of penny-wise and pound-foolish behaviour that happens in any large business. As you say, the productions cost dwarf the costs of subtitling so much it is ridiculous. Every unique frame of that show was literally hand drawn and colored by someone, to say nothing of all the writers, the voiceover, the marketing, etc. To refuse the light penny-shaving required to present the final product in a good light is completely non-sensical. If you have so little confidence then why are you licensing and paying for bandwidth to show it?
However, there is somebody in charge of subtitles, and they don't really care about overall business outcomes. So if they can reduce the budget of their department by squeezing typesetting, they win on an objective metric at the cost of a subjective (ie ignored) one.
While it's true crunchyroll has a lot of the anime market, there are more streaming platforms than ever right now, and people don't just consume a fixed amount of legal anime episodes per week, forever unchanging. If they have it in their head that they cannot gain or lose subscribers, that's extremely short-sighted.
muzani
I wonder if it's just a limited number of people who could do this. There was a time when nearly all the anime in my country was dubbed by 2-3 people (and why all the anime had the same lame voices). Maybe if they were paid the same rates as proper voice actors, the quality and people willing to do so would go up.
kcexn
Presumably the company translating and subtitling anime is licensing the show, not producing it. So subtitling and translation costs for a business like Crunchyroll would be most of their production budget (assuming licensing fees are not egregious).
numpad0
idk but I think it's possible that baseline licensing fees are/were way lower than imagined. The entire rest of the world except Japan, in many anime type contexts in Japan, are still considered the singular entity as "the kaigai". Export sales are just coin rooms.
Or, this could be reflection of that "the kaigai" mindset rapidly changing causing prices to skyrocket. Anime is exclusively made in Japan(with outsource efforts from all over East Asia, but always concentrated back into Japan), so there's no competition. Zero competition over nonzero demand -> +Inf price.
Either ways, it does feel that licensing model could be key to understanding this.
aidenn0
I sampled a couple of shows on Netfix and I couldn't find any anime subtitled in English; just closed-captioning of the English dub. Netflix's selection I would describe as "fine," so the quality of the subtitles is, IMO a big differentiator for Crunchyroll and given that my household is looking to reduce the streaming services, this change makes the decision of "which one" a lot easier.
undefined
sergers
I was on the animeone[AonE] team 2001 to 2007 atleast.
Good old substationalpha ssa/ass timing memories.
PebblesHD
I’ve posted before about my half-in half-out life between Japan and Australia, and the media I consume is a product of this. Anime, while not a massive part of my watching habit, is certainly a weekly thing at least, and over the past few years it’s been getting harder and harder to support legal services outside of Japan.
In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc.
They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’.
I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.
silicon5
The Crunchyroll/Funimation merger was a really bad deal for fans, in that a huge number of series were never ported over to Crunchyroll before the Funimation shutdown.
Initially, the two had a deal where Funimation would allow subtitle-only versions of series to appear on Crunchyroll, while Funimation would focus on the dub audience. In November 2018 some corporate hijinks happened, and the alliance was considered no longer viable. Funi pulled about 240 series from Crunchyroll, amounting to nearly 20% of Crunchyroll's library at the time.
When the merger happened in 2024, Funimation's shutdown FAQ implied that Funimation's content would be available on Crunchyroll, and even encouraged users to cancel their Funimation subscription and subscribe to Crunchyroll going forward. However, there are still some 182 series which never made it back to Crunchyroll, even though they had been there before. There are just a bunch of anime that aren't legitimately available on any streaming service any more.
zdw
The funny thing about this narrative is that Crunchyroll also started out as an "informal distribution" pirate site, and had all the good things you mentioned beat out of them by successive acquisitions and corporate ownership.
SllX
They’re still just within the threshold of good enough, but I was pretty annoyed the day comments disappeared. It might have been young viewers, but I was a young viewer once and those comments went back all the way to that time. It was also one thing Crunchyroll had that other streaming sites typically don’t (except YouTube of course): community.
bavell
CR removing comments removed the soul from the product :/
Was always fun reading the top comments on big episodes. Finding those few other ppl who noticed that one small thing at timestamp 14:30, dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai... etc
vunderba
It's a shame but understandable from a business perspective since they had to have a moderation team to support some of the less savory comments juvenile users were leaving.
ToucanLoucan
Corporate consolidation ruins products left and right. I wish we had a functioning regulatory body.
kbolino
I'd rather have one good streaming service with everything on it than the dozens of crappy streaming services with their ever-shifting patchwork of available licensed content we have now. Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.
PebblesHD
Challenge is we ended up with one really bad streaming service but lots of capital slurping up all the licenses. In my ideal world, the regulator would prevent using exclusivity as a moat to prevent smaller operations competing.
Australia is a tiny market but before the big american companies bought them out, our local AnimeLab offering was one of the worlds best. If a new similarly oriented offering could launch and compete I’d love to see it, but sadly only pirate operations can do so, and are doing so effectively.
redwall_hp
There's a reason it was law in the US that movie production companies couldn't own movie theaters: distribution should be required to be separate to ensure choice on the viewer side due to the inherent non-fungibility of entertainment media. In other words, if through copyright we grant a monopoly, then it's not a sustainable situation for the distribution to also be allowed to consolidate.
mkozlows
And what makes the one streaming service stay good, with no competitors?
chii
> Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.
completely agree - i think the gov't regulatory body should change the landscape to what film and cinema have; such that distributor of media cannot own and monopolize the broadcast rights on their own platform, and publisher of media be forced to sell/license at the same price to all distributors.
This way, a streaming service can always know and pay for a broadcasting license for _any_ media, and all media must be license-able for any streaming service (at the same price), thus no monopoly can exist under this system.
zdw
I tend to agree with this take - look at the book or music industry, where you can buy most media in each category on most platforms, with some exceptions.
Ideally, like music, we'd get multiple vendors offering downloads that are high quality copy of video that isn't DRM encumbered.
But currently, we don't get this, and the closest legitimate way (modulo the DMCA...) to get video as a file is to buy physical media and rip it.
Serious shades of Gabe Newell's "it's a service problem, not a pricing problem" around all of this.
pjc50
Just imagine what the British regulatory body OFCOM would do with anime.
echelon
It might take a few more decades, but Google will ultimately win the streaming wars.
I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.
You can also interpret that as I'll be shocked if AI doesn't result in every mangaka becoming their own small studio and distributing via YouTube.
axpy906
> I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.
In 2002 it was and I really liked it then.
zdw
YouTube was founded in 2005, is this a typo?
lanyard-textile
I think you’re right for certain use cases. When I want to watch a specific movie, you can pull it up and rent it super easy on YouTube.
No fuss. It’s basically a 1-click operation. $2.99 or whatever to watch your movie in good quality.
Hamuko
There are some anime that are simulcast on YouTube. Watanare was one of them during the summer 2025 season.
anigbrowl
I'll be shocked if they're able to get noticed above the tide of slop and industrially automated bogus copyright claims.
echelon
Discovery has always been a problem.
You can look to the past to see what this might look like in the future:
- Publishing in the digital publishing era.
- Indie Gaming in the Steam Greenlight era.
- Indie music in the digital recording / DAW era.
- Trying to make it as an actor or musician in general.
- YouTuber careers vs. "YouTube poop"
- Trying to make it as a streamer / influencer
Novelty, self-promo, luck, preparation, right place/right time, likeability -- there are lots of things that can come together to make it work. But it's still a lot of work.
egypturnash
Crunchyroll’s major layoff just two months ago, during which most of their operations team was unceremoniously let go, included some of the longest-serving Crunchyrollers, adding up to a combined total of around 100 years of service to the company by my calculations. Is a new subcontractor and/or service the replacement? It seems that way to me.
And there's your answer. Bet they're replacing most of their artisinal subtitlers with AI.
xenadu02
They did the same thing to their developers a few years back from what I recall. That's why the app has bugs that haven't been fixed in years. For example the sorting options on your watch list are just garbage. They aren't remembered. And "recent activity" includes adding dubs in languages I have disabled in the UI - constantly causing old shows to pop to the top of the list making it useless.
Back when they had software developers they were rapidly improving the app but someone decided they needed more executive bonuses and laid everyone off. Their software hasn't moved an inch since.
Funimation had the same idea. They bailed out of VRV (Crunchyroll's attempt at an anime "marketplace" all-in-one app) and released their own garbage app that is somehow much much worse.
It is the classic "we have exclusives so these drooling morons will take whatever we deign to give them because we're the only ones with show X/Y/Z" move.
redwall_hp
I will still never complain about CrunchyRoll's apps after using HiDive for a few shows. It can't even remember shows I'm watching, let alone keep track of watched episodes, and insists on rendering subtitles with TVs' closed captioning system.
xenadu02
That's very true. Crunchyroll is just sad because it used to be good and feel like someone involved cared.
Funimation lowered the bar so much I thought it couldn't go lower.
Who knew HiDive would prove me wrong.
radicaldreamer
They're for sure doing this and have been caught: https://x.com/d0nut2x/status/1940107015533285646
sunaookami
The AI subtitles are delivered by the original company (Cygames in this case) and CR used them without proofreading. This happened to a few other animes in the past in Germany.
For its own translations in Germany, CR uses freelancers which are VERY GOOD at their job, do not confuse them with the US Crunchyroll which consists mostly of the infamous Funimation staff.
Pikamander2
Looks like they blamed it on a third-party vendor.
https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1lqzdva/crunchyroll_...
They probably went with a "lowest bidder" approach and then didn't sufficiently check the quality of work being submitted.
Narretz
Amazon Prime did it as well and it was absolutely horrible. Character names got completely butchered, and changed from one scene to the next.
Analemma_
It's alright, I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto us, the customers.
Culonavirus
I'm sure they will. You know, AI is so cheap compared to humans, they have to, right? I'm sure. Obviously that is until the biggest bubble in the recorded history of human economy pops and we get back to 2008 economy (hopium), then it's gonna sting a wee bit, but that's the cost of progress, right.
makeitdouble
I really wish we could have had a subs/dubs marketplace. There was no way to make it a proper business when anime was becoming popular on the net, but it would solve an infinite number of problems. Could it be done now that the distribution channels are more mature in Japan ?
- Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the translation through their players. That could be the toughest pill to swallow for Japanese production houses, many are just allergic to opening up, but that would be so great.
They could still license in specific countries (US?) or specific purposes (theatrical release, BD etc) provided it isn't exclusive.
- good translators would have a shot at asking for more money. Fans who don't give a damn could still get freeish half auto translated stuff, while the deeper fandom could support their people.
- "long tail" countries could get their translations as well. There's just no way CR ever does Zimbabwe subs, but a few hundreds of fans could pay some guy to make it for them against a canonical video file bought from the content owner. win-win.
kcexn
My first thought here is that an open market for translations would just create lots of really bad, free translations and make discovering good translations impossible.
Ultimately, there will be a concern that it devalues the translation process, leading to translators getting paid less, not more.
makeitdouble
I'm not aware of the landscape right now, but for a long time the absolute best translations were free, and potentially baked into pirated videos.
Anime viewers tend to be passionate, I think there's a reasonable chance to have groups emerge with a reputation to defend and getting paid more than they are now (which could be 0)
cyphar
> I think there's a reasonable chance to have groups emerge with a reputation to defend
This already exists today -- translation groups rush to be the first to translate a new series, and some fans have strong preferences around which groups provide the best translations (both in terms of accuracy and style). You can see the set of groups doing translations on the AniDB page for any Anime you like.
braiamp
I remember watching a video a decade ago, of someone doing review of the subs for each group that was doing Black Rock Shooter, specifically the wheelchair scene, because what it's said has to be taken within the context of what's presented.
hedora
This could work in the same way fiction podcasts do: Have an editorial board rank decide which translations they want to pay for.
Make sure the editorial board is paid a living wage and the translators are too. Set up a marketplace for a dozen such organizations, and let them compete. All the incentives align.
theogravity
It's already happening. There are visual novel groups that take pateron sponsorship to run the script through machine translation. It's now done in giant batches. They're released for free and I am not able to speak of the quality as I've never tried them, but when I see reviews on steam for a VN that has been machine translated, it never results in a good review.
HaZeust
this is a huge problem with opensubtitles - download count or year count for a TV show or movie's subtitles tells you absolutely nothing about how reliable it is.
theogravity
My first thought would be consistency in localization / typesetting. Groups have their own ways of localizing and typesetting content and most likely would not want to share their style guide when they lost out on something they recently translated to a lower bidder.
makeitdouble
Isn't it the same issue when a localization team/member with its distinct style decides to get off the train and the next contractor can't replicate it ?
Tor3
That appears to happen sometimes in the middle of Crunchyroll seasons. Suddenly the translations change. Spelling of names, other things. Jarring.
theogravity
Yes
Ferret7446
> I really wish we could have had a subs/dubs marketplace.
There already is (at least for subs). In the wise words of Gabe Newell, piracy is a service problem.
numpad0
> Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the translation through their players.
What does it even mean? The IP[1] holding single-purpose LLCs[2] have no means of distribution on its own. They commission sweatshops and license the artifacts to TV stations and streaming services. They can sell to Western streaming services like Netflix or send in brochures to American TV stations, in case they're taking it, but if they aren't taking it, then they aren't taking it.
I guess they can set up an IP to be worldwide exclusive on nicovideo.jp and let anyone pay for nicovideo.jp Premium subscription through VISA. But how many is going to actually sign up and how long will VISA work if it worked?
Japanese companies being "just allergic to opening up" is definitely half of the story or more, but it's also not the whole picture. The masses, and the distributors that can reach the masses, are also involved.
1: as in intellectual property, copyright, not the set of octets
2: the oft in-universe-named entity like "Julius Deane Import Export" shown in the copyright line
makeitdouble
Many IP holders belong to a group like Kadokawa, which straight own several streaming platforms (dwango/niconico is a perfect example of this)
Other groups like DMM or Fuji already have their direct platform where they also stream their own content. Except they fiercely cut it from foreign registration.
They all already accept credit cards, and could further cut H content from foreign audiences if needed.
If they wanted to, they could open it internationaly tomorrow.
IshKebab
You couldn't do this legally without cooperation from the license holders, and good luck with that.
makeitdouble
License holders have the means to do it themselves (and keep the money), they're already bound to streaming companies.
Dylan16807
> If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.”
I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
kalleboo
The only video I've seen that uses the YouTube subtitle capabilities to their fullest, with animated subs etc is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDc1mjrIsPM and even then you have to dig down into the settings cog and choose "English - Animated" manually
jdranczewski
https://caption.plus/ does excellent work for a couple YouTube/Nebula channels - not as exciting as the above, but they do coloured speakers, positioning to avoid in-video text, and an occasional animation to punch up a joke! I'm most familiar with their work for Tom Scott (+ the Technical Difficulties) and Jet Lag: The Game.
Conan_Kudo
I think one of the biggest mistakes was not making WebVTT equivalent to Advanced SubStation Alpha (the format of Aegisub). That would have driven basically all the various streaming services to grow support for the things anime subbers have done for years.
Arnavion
No need for a new format, just use ASS itself! https://github.com/libass/JavascriptSubtitlesOctopus
afishhh
> I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
Yep, their srv3 format is very usable, although it is in many ways inferior to ASS (animations have to be done manually in discrete timesteps, although YTSubConverter does that for you I think, and no crazy stuff like shape drawing or 3d transforms). Does support ruby text though which ASS currently doesn't.
I think the worst thing about it is actually that YouTube is not doing very well in getting people to use it. For example they don't support most of the format's functionality in any client that isn't the web one[1]. Additionally I don't think there's even an official way to create these complex subtitles, you have to use unofficial tools like YTSubConverter.
If anyone is interested, I am working on a library for rendering srv3 (and some WebVTT) here[2]. Maybe if we had widespread support people would use it more? That seems like very wishful thinking though :)
[1] I suspect this is because they have to work within the constraints of whatever UI frameworks they're using for apps. It does not seem possible to implement compliant web text layout (pretty complicated!) on top of such higher level systems.
DoneWithAllThat
This is a random aside but somewhere I have some slightly obscure early 2000s anime with fan subs, and in one of them they accidentally left an additional “working notes” subtitle track that I find fascinating. It basically has all the little messages between the participants discussing whether a given translation is accurate or should be changed, alternative ideas, disagreements over proper translation, etc. It really illustrates how subtitling is nowhere near an exact science and oftentimes whether a given translation is the best is highly subjective. You basically need to be a good writer to be a good translator.
eviks
> Most anime have exclusive streaming licenses, so for ~70% of 2025’s new releases, and an even larger share of catalog shows and movies, Crunchyroll is often your only means to do so. But that’s not an issue.
Strange to see an article describing the issue - degrading the subtitle quality, which affects all the content due to this licensing ~monopoly - while simultaneously rejecting its existence.
asimpletune
This is random but Aegisub is an amazing tool and a wonderful way to get ear training when you're learning a language.
liampulles
Haven't thought of it as a language learning tool before, that is an interesting way of looking at it.
jmward01
The subs are noticeably worse in a continuing trend. Maybe I am just now noticing it but in the dubs for the most recent shows it seems like the important subs for text (like important signs, etc) in a dub are also now missing and only come up if you turn subs on with the dub. Crunchyroll has clearly also done other things though that have impacted the experience. They started by removing comments and a year ago (?) and then added the -incredibly- annoying wipe to 'here watch this' that can't be avoided when a show ends and there isn't a next episode. We will see how they evolve. Are there any other actually good services out there? hidive has very limited content and a terrible interface. I don't know of anything with the catalogue that crunchyroll has.
socalgal2
Are they just bad now? The one I noticed was the "Kingdom" which is several years old. It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and characters but the spoken language was Japanese. So the sub would say "General Mike is going to attack Houston" and the spoken Japanese would say "General Bob is going to attach Seattle" (fill in Mike and Houston with Chinese names and Bob and Seattle with Japaense names)
jan_Inkepa
> It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and character
More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones?
I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do!
(IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)
kbolino
It is a weird mix.
Kingdom at least has some connection to historical places/people so it kind of makes sense.
Thunderbolt Fantasy on the other hand is completely original/fictional in setting and characters, and yet still uses the Chinese names in the subtitles. While it is a joint Taiwanese-Japanese project, the only available audio is Japanese. So none of the completely made up names ever match between audio and subtitles.
And then there's Dragon Ball with e.g. Son Goku who is named after the Monkey King from Journey to the West but nobody ever refers to him as Sun Wukong.
makeitdouble
It's a tough one for Chinese names. Japan will usually read the actual kanji but with their Japanese reading, which sounds nothing like the actual Chinese. And western audience will probably be more familiar with the Chinese name, except if they have their own weird pronouciation altogether.
For instance the current PRC chairman, Xi Jinping, has an alphabet reading close to Chinese, but Japanese news will call him along the lines of "Shu Kinpei", which sounds absolutely nothing near the original name, but is how someone would read the name assuming it was Japanese and with no pronounciations hints. They just don't care much about the sounds when it comes Asian names, even in official settings.
pif
> Since the most recent round of Crunchyroll layoffs
What's the point of writing a full article when the answer is literally in the eighth word?
b3lvedere
Maybe some people are still amazed to witness that machines still cannot create the same quality content that (passionate) human (teams) can create? Quality takes patience, time and money.
o11c
It really shouldn't be "extremely expensive to re-encode each language’s video files!". Has this industry not heard of transparent overlays?
silicon5
Most anime on Crunchyroll are softsubs. There's a single video file for each supported resolution, an audio file for each language, and a subtitle file in the highly versatile .ass format (Advanced SubStation Alpha). There are some anime in hardsubs, but usually older legacy series such as were originally DVDs.
Izkata
That explanation doesn't make sense because they are doing that: there's a few groups that explicitly rip and share Crunchyroll's subtitles (one is mentioned in the article).
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Hah, this is my time to shine. I worked in anime subtitling and timing for a number of years. I helped write our style guide — things like how to handle signs, overlapping dialogue, colors etc.
It wound up being quite a large document!
But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching English subs to Japanese dialogue. So what you have to do is have a human with some small grasp of Japanese place each of these in/out times by hand.
If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. But that’s ONLY if you don’t spend any extra time coloring and moving the subs around the screen (as you would song and sign captions).
Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”
Crunchy roll looks to have at least gone halfway for a while… but multiply those times across thousands of episodes over X years… and you can see why some manager somewhere finally decided 35 minutes was good enough.
I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move. Anime fans LOVE anime. The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. I really miss the excitement that my customers would get (and happily telegraph!) when I launched a product in those days. Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. Especially with a super fan base like you have in anime.