The Case of the ‘Indulgent’ Subscription

by Rian

Bit of context before I get into the whole fiasco. The choke point of physical ownership is real estate. Everyone who has ever tried owning every contents would know this. At some point, medium takes up more space than the media: books, movies, musics, video games, just about all of them. Movies, especially, would hit close at home for most of us. VHS, Betamax, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, the list of mediums are keep growing for the same movie. And some of the mediums haven’t even survived its own era. Streaming has solved this, albeit at a price.

I had started looking for anime and general Japanese TV series streaming platform quite a while ago. One of my long time favorite show, Trick, is no longer aired in South Korea. I don’t know if the last theatric piece, the finale of the franchise, was ever released here. But my point is simple. There are old media simply inaccessible through popular (e.g. Netflix, Disney+, and so on) streaming platform. There are bound to be gaps. The promises of free upgrades, best available quality without surcharge per title, are meaningless when it’s not on the catalogue. And it gets progressively worse for Japanese animated series, or anime.

CrunchyRoll still doesn’t service in South Korea. There was a rumor of them signing a deal with a local streaming partner, but I don’t think it became of anything. But there is something to be said about CR’s approach to streaming — almost Spotify-like approach. It offers convenience to the library, better quality in both videos and audios, their licensing agreement gives more leverage on how it’s streamed and how the contents are localized. I believe it to be a standard practice seen in most successful streaming services.

In CR’s absence, a domestic anime streaming service has taken hold in Korea. But as far as I could find, it is riddled with issues. Its libraries are dubious at best; it lists dubs and subs as separate entries, and different seasons as separate entries as well. Its sub support is underwhelming; it’s hard-coded to the media, so users don’t have control over the subtitles. Then there’s the whole controversy over the quality of the media they stream. One of the subscribers did some digging into the streaming data, only to find out it is streaming at max 6 mbps — there is even a counter claim it averages out at 3 mbps. That is not all. The video is re-encoded from anime master to TV broadcast, from TV broadcast to streaming, to the point where the post claimed it is using already limited 6 mbps bandwidth recklessly.

When I subscribe to Netflix, even when I own the same movie in either physical or digital medium on different platforms, I do it because of two reasons: one. the library is well managed, two. the quality of Netflix streaming is often times better than old-timey Blu-ray I have. When I’m interested binge watching a series, I don’t have to switch titles; same goes with switching from dubs to subs. So long as I am subscribed, I know for a fact that these streaming services will push the best available quality over the air, so long as my home theater setup can handle it. That is not quite the case with the home-grown anime streaming service I found.

Their defense? Indulgence. It’s in their marketing slogan, one of the highlighted reviews. Not so surprisingly, I was able to find disgruntled threads where subscribers were resorting to piracy. The same anime they paid for with “legal” subscription, they are pirating it because of the quality issues. It seems, I gather, neither the convenience nor the quality are the service’s strong suit. With the rumors of CR, now owned by Sony, might be making a landfall in Korea, I suppose it begs the question. Is this not a subscription purely for pardoning piracy?