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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Living in Germany, but I'm an american. Signed up for Crunchy Roll. Most the shows my friends are recommending are region locked. The remaining ones are mostly German-dubbed only, with no subtitles. Most don't have original Japanese either.

Only a handful I want to watch actually have subs or English dubs.

It's not like I don't want to pay for this stuff but when it's a huge conditional tree of if I'm going to have a good experience, with no other (non-pirate alternative), what do you do?

Meanwhile, Spotify doesn't have this issue. Happily pay for that, despite not being a fan of how the company operates.

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It's really not that bad. CrunchyRoll has _almost_ everything, especially since Sony bought Funimation and AOD shut down. Some of the real Blockbusters miss sometimes (Oshi no ko, Cyberpunk, Pluto, etc.) because those are the ones that are worth it for Netflix, Amazon and Disney+. CR is great for someone watching a lot of anime. If you want to watch the one or two big shows each season you might not find them there though. I rarely find anything I can't watch in Japanese with english subtitles.

(Old stuff is often missing too. if you're after that those I understand what you mean.)

Interesting that you mention Crunchyroll.

I subscribe to both CR and Spotify im the U.S., and one thing they have in common is terrible user interfaces (IMHO).

I would be so excited if CR provided an API to let subscribers write their own clients.

Yeah CRs UX is bad. Check out this chrome extension its a huge QOL jump https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mal-sync/kekjfbackd...

My other huge complaint about CR is it will just be missing a season of a show. I tried to watch one and it had only seasons 2-3-4 etc.

The anime situation in Germany is years behind. Germans are famously moralising against piracy but this seems to be a case where they do it anyway because it’s just impossible to find anime otherwise

Wouldn't a VPN solve this for you?

Until they start blocking VPNs like other streaming services? Piracy is a solution that doesn't end up a cat and mouse game. Sounds like op is paying for the content but it's region locked, so the dumbest form of pushing your customers to piracy.

The problem is that I have to pay for another thing just to watch the thing I was already paying for.

Piracy almost always is caused by a lack of convenience, namely:

"I get the service, have a (sometimes very) limited selection of stuff, and have to pay for it, and if I want that other thing I have to pay for another entirely different service"

"I get anything I want with a little hassle, but for free"

What's the difference with pirating then? I do pirate when media owners go to great length to make consuming it legally very hard.

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