Crunchyroll Needs To Adapt Or It Will Die

Crunchyroll is a streaming subscription service and content host which brings anime and manga to desperate and lonely weebs like myself, although my weeb power level hasn't quite gone up in a long time.

If you live anywhere other than Japan and you like anime, I'd wager a guess that your main anime source is Crunchyroll (or like, Netflix's paltry selection), or pirating. Not trying to out anyone, but the only other option is expensive imports or bootlegs and I doubt anyone is really doing that.

Now I like Crunchyroll. I like the idea that for an affordable price you can stream seasons of anime and get it at a decent quality with decent subs, and the upload schedule is fair. However, Crunchyroll might have the worst user experience out of all the streaming services I use and honestly, that doesn't bode well. The more I use it, the more feature bare it seems. And that's led me to one conclusion;

Crunchyroll needs to adapt, or it will die.

Any software solution has two parts, the back end and the front end. Back end is the hardcore mechanical stuff, such as the netcode and videoplayback and generally Crunchyroll does alright with that. Crunchyroll works, but it's the front end, the bells and whistles, the user interface that really lets the service down.

For starters, there are web 1.0 sites that are more visually appealing than this eyesore of trying to pass itself off as a design. Websites nowadays look a lot more like applications than interactive word documents and that's just the start of the problems with Crunchyroll.

Here's what Crunchyroll could use:

1. Animated Thumbnails

2. Trailers

3. Original Content

4. A Cleaner Interface

5. Curated suggestions of content on the home page

6. Animations, please, for the love of god, add animations to this website

7. Larger fonts

8. Skip Intro Button

9. Autoplay (At least moving to the next episode of the thing you're watching after 5 seconds)

10. A Continue Watching Tab

11. Dark Mode, Jesus please.

That's just all off the back of my head from different, better video streaming services. I couldn't believe this stuff was missing when it's clearly not that difficult to implement.

But this article is a dime a fucking dozen, everyone has gripes with Crunchyroll for different reasons and I'm not the first asshole to suggest it. Maybe use some of that massive marketing budget that hasn't built up the audience you've wanted.

What I wanna say is that I like anime, I want it to get to more people, I want more people to have access to a good service to use it.

It cannot be that hard to implement that. It just cannot.