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?
And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?
$100k per month is extra revenue, if they do a half-assed job. A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).
The price of the subscription is already adjusted to be the maximum of what the market would bear for maximum revenue - presumably raising that price higher would lead to lower subscribers and revenue.
That’s the key right there.
When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality.
Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality product.
They have 17 million paying subscribers. If they subtitled 1,000 episodes of content a month * 200$ = 200k / 17 million ~= 1 cent per subscriber per month. Actual cost per subscriber is well below that.
Outside of Asia, Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly on legal anime. From the article, 70% of new releases are exclusive to Crunchyroll. They're not losing customers to platforms with better subs, because customers have no alternative.
(Besides pirating, but I assume the golden age of Tier 1 fan subs is over)
That's just because the legal options were easily available, right? Kind of like people stopped pirating as much when Netflix was actually decent. But now the tides are turning again, so maybe the fan subs will start coming back as well.
Still, though, I wonder if that mindset is still going to be around.
I remember seeing (I think Netflix release) of Komi-san can't communicate, noticing A lot of things being missed, like Komi's literal main manner of communication (A notebook where she writes) not getting any translation for some episodes, or a lot of things I'd have to fill others in that normally at least would have been a T/N in fansub
It was bad enough that I went looking elsewhere to see if I had missed more than I realized, and the fansub did have everything covered
Here's the answer right here...
* Shonen anime, which are consistently the most popular ones, are also on netflix and probably several other services. Eg, demon slayer, dandadan, etc.
* there are still shows that are japan-exclusive because nobody bothers to license them. Roboshinkalion is an entire franchise that nobody cares to import! We actually had to wait two extra years for gridman universe because nobody bothered to license it for English localization!
* just this year they failed to obtain the rights to Mobile Suit Gundam G-Quuuuuux and Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt because amazon outbid them. These are both new entries in well-established brands and they're both made by studios with large fan followings (khara for g-quuuuuux and trigger for panty and stocking).
* somehow Hulu ended up breaking harmony gold's 45-year blockade around the macross franchise and won exclusive streaming rights.
* netflix has a lot of exclusives these days, including Jojo stone ocean and the upcoming steelball run.
They should probably consider that this competitor is actually mpv playing the DRM-free blu-ray quality fully subtitled mkv files obtained for a grand total of zero dollars from organized groups of people who simply care about anime to an absurd degree.
"Paying customer" is a synonym for "fool" in this context. Paying for inferior products is just foolish. It is damaging to one's self-respect. It is even more damaging for the reputation of the corporation. A bunch of fans regularly put them to shame by releasing better products on a daily basis. That's just pathetic.
But still, I often find myself watching anime from fansub groups even though I have a legitimate, official way of watching them. Paying for a streaming service that is objectively, significantly worse than even the shittier pirate offerings does make me feel like a fool.
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.
It's not just about translation, after all, but localization. While you can (or kind of have to) assume some level of familiarity with Japanese life/culture for someone watching anime, it's easier for a native English speaker/someone who grew up in North America to notice cultural disconnects and figure them out.
An example I once heard: a book in Italian might say the character "ordered a coffee" and then "picked up the coffee, drank it, and walked out of the cafe". An Italian without as much consideration of American culture might translate that directly, but someone who understands localization would know that Italian character ordered what we would call an espresso, and know to change the text to be specific; otherwise, it sounds as though the person is guzzling an entire mug of black coffee on the spot, which would likely come across as psychotic and unnerving compared to taking a single shot of espresso.
Likewise, an Italian reader of an American novel might be unable to comprehend how or why an American character could spend 20 minutes nursing a cup of coffee, because they might be picturing a 1-2 oz espresso rather than a drip coffee.
So yeah, that's the big part of why it can't just be someone who knows English to some sufficient degree - because without fluency in spoken and written English, familiarity with how things would be said in English, and cultural differences between Japan and North America, you're going to end up with all kinds of dissonance.
These are the questions that would get played out in the decision process.