this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).

Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.

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[–] phx@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago

I much prefer owned media over subscriptions, but this is perhaps one area where they're actually good. A bad business decision that drives away customers can have a pretty immediate and visible impact on revenue. It's not "hey nobody bought our latest release, blame racism/sexism/wokeness" or whatever other whipping-boy they choose to bury their heads in the sand with, it's "we did a thing and within days to a month people were leaving us."

In many cases, this drives them to actually pay attention to customer reactions. We've seen the same with Disney in regards to Kimmel and I wouldn't be surprised to see recent changes to Gamepass have a similar impact. I hate to say it, but subscriptions like this really do allow customers to vote with their wallets.

Which is also why many are probably going to try to lock more customers in to longer terms, add gimmicks, and generally make it harder to unsubscribe. Kinda like phone companies. We'll likely end up with a "streaming sign-up/connection fee" and offers like "**free Frozen tablet with a two year Disney+ subscription"

** regular price $599, applied as a discount from your regular bill over 24mo

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago

Greed kills

[–] ramble81@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Have this odd bug where CC is enabled at first on every episode and man, it’s bad. Luckily subs for JP dubs are somewhat decent but I feel bad for anyone who needs closed captioning.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

CC is a separate setting from the subtitles. There is a place to turn it off but it's so unintuitive I can never remember it. All it really is, though is dub dialog. There was no attempt at proper closed captioning.

[–] ramble81@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah I turn the setting off and next time I launch the app, it’s tuned right back on. Works fine on my PC, just not my XB1.

And the CCs don’t even get the dub dialog right. Names are beyond mangled it looks like they’re trying to run it through a realtime recognition system to do auto captions. It’d be worlds better if they just uploaded the ADR script at that point.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What I meant is there is a separate overall setting to turn it off. I think it is an app specific setting. If you just turn them off in the settings for the show, it will only affect that session.

Also it's sad to hear they've gotten worse. They were bad enough before when they were dub dialog only.

[–] ramble81@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 weeks ago

Yup! That’s the setting I’m referring to. The global one resets every time on me. I have to go into the show and turn it off at the start of every episode. It’s a pain in the ass.

[–] Limonene@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

I would never subscribe to Crunchyroll, because they use DRM.

[–] midtsveen@lemmy.wtf 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The whole “calling out Israel for genocide means you’re antisemitic” line is so worn out and honestly just exhausting. Israel has spent like 4+ decades trying desperately to associate criticism of israel with antisemitism.

I’ve been boycotting Crunchyroll for years, and I’m not stopping anytime soon.

"Piracy is a human right, collective ownership of the seas, comrades!" — Erik L. Midtsveen

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