November 21, 2008

  • "The fan group Dattebayo has announced that it will stop subtitling and distributing the Naruto anime franchise "permanently" on January 15. That date is when the Naruto.com, Crunchyroll, Hulu, and Joost websites will officially begin streaming the latest episodes of the Naruto Shippūden sequel series one week after their Japanese broadcast — for free. A Dattebayo organizer who uses the alias "Interactii" says that an episode of Naruto Shippūden would get 450,000 downloads from Dattebayo in its first week. According to Dattebayo, the group accumulated 976,405 downloads for episode 20 in 489 days ... Group organizer says "Viz and Crunchyroll have gotten their acts together" "
    -ANN

    We're moving in the right direction!  I've noted that many of the fansub groups are surprisingly willing to listen to reason when it comes to ceasing their actions when the series is picked up properly.  The future looks bright if the American companies keep this up ^_^

    On a much less pleasant note, Broccoli International's USA branch has announced that it will be closing up shop at the end of this year.  This leaves a few good, but grantedly niche, manga and anime series out in the cold.  Hopefully some of the more well established companies will move in and save some of them; but it's still sad that Broccoli, who was so consistantly high-quality, won't be in charge of series like Galaxy Angel, Disgaea (the manga), and FLCL anymore.  I hope that their employees will find good jobs in some of the more well-established American anime companies.

Comments (3)

  • Interesting groups and businesses. I shall have to look them up some time.

  • I saw this on the DB site and was going to include it in my news round-up, but you scooped me.  Darn.  Well, I'm still going to post on it!

    I wouldn't say the future looks bright, because as Interactii alluded to in his press release, professional subs are not necessarily superior to high-quality fansubs.  Most importantly, fewer options are available to the viewers, not more: no longer will there be an option to download Naruto episodes and save them; it will only be possible to stream them.  Nothing prevents these companies from yanking the streams after a bit and leaving viewers with neither fansub nor stream to watch.

    Incidentally, Interactii is a typesetter, I think.  It's interesting to see him labeled an "organizer."

  • Btw . . . not to dump on you, but because I'll forget - I wanted to watch ToraDora at Crunchyroll but they took it down and no fansub group has it because, well, that's redundant, right?  I'm not liking the "let the official sites stream it" paradigm so far.

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