Crunchyroll’s major layoff just two months ago, during which most of their operations team was unceremoniously let go, included some of the longest-serving Crunchyrollers, adding up to a combined total of around 100 years of service to the company by my calculations. Is a new subcontractor and/or service the replacement? It seems that way to me.
And there's your answer. Bet they're replacing most of their artisinal subtitlers with AI.
I’ve posted before about my half-in half-out life between Japan and Australia, and the media I consume is a product of this. Anime, while not a massive part of my watching habit, is certainly a weekly thing at least, and over the past few years it’s been getting harder and harder to support legal services outside of Japan.
In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc.
They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’.
I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.
For at least the past year, subtitles under dubs have been horrendous. I’ve watched a handful of Gundam series over this period, and while the subtitles under the Japanese audio are usually fine, the captions that run under the English audio more often than not get every single proper noun completely wrong, and half the dialog in general.
A generous explanation would be that the localized subtitles under the Japanese audio are licensed for use with that audio only, but that’s pure conjecture, and even if that’s the case, there is no excuse for how terrible the captions can be.
>see it as a cost-cutting measure to stop doing it.
If only. I wish they would stop localizing it. Just give me the raw episodes. It seems like every site outside of Japan insists on ruing it by putting English on top of it. Unfortunately the economics of the situation means that sites will server the interests of tourists instead of otaku, so it's unlikely to ever change.
Hah, this is my time to shine. I worked in anime subtitling and timing for a number of years. I helped write our style guide — things like how to handle signs, overlapping dialogue, colors etc.
It wound up being quite a large document!
But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching English subs to Japanese dialogue. So what you have to do is have a human with some small grasp of Japanese place each of these in/out times by hand.
If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. But that’s ONLY if you don’t spend any extra time coloring and moving the subs around the screen (as you would song and sign captions).
Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”
Crunchy roll looks to have at least gone halfway for a while… but multiply those times across thousands of episodes over X years… and you can see why some manager somewhere finally decided 35 minutes was good enough.
I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move. Anime fans LOVE anime. The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. I really miss the excitement that my customers would get (and happily telegraph!) when I launched a product in those days. Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. Especially with a super fan base like you have in anime.
>If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes.
I miss the days of hand-timing 25 minute episodes in about 20 minutes in Aegisub because I learned to read the waveform, and had custom snap-to-keyframe commands set up in Aegisub.
Of course, the typesetting would take 8 hours, but timing was always easy.
I really wish we could have had a subs/dubs marketplace. There was no way to make it a proper business when anime was becoming popular on the net, but it would solve an infinite number of problems. Could it be done now that the distribution channels are more mature in Japan ?
- Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the translation through their players. That could be the toughest pill to swallow for Japanese production houses, many are just allergic to opening up, but that would be so great.
They could still license in specific countries (US?) or specific purposes (theatrical release, BD etc) provided it isn't exclusive.
- good translators would have a shot at asking for more money. Fans who don't give a damn could still get freeish half auto translated stuff, while the deeper fandom could support their people.
- "long tail" countries could get their translations as well. There's just no way CR ever does Zimbabwe subs, but a few hundreds of fans could pay some guy to make it for them against a canonical video file bought from the content owner. win-win.
> Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the translation through their players.
What does it even mean? The IP[1] holding single-purpose LLCs[2] have no means of distribution on its own. They commission sweatshops and license the artifacts to TV stations and streaming services. They can sell to Western streaming services like Netflix or send in brochures to American TV stations, in case they're taking it, but if they aren't taking it, then they aren't taking it.
I guess they can set up an IP to be worldwide exclusive on nicovideo.jp and let anyone pay for nicovideo.jp Premium subscription through VISA. But how many is going to actually sign up and how long will VISA work if it worked?
Japanese companies being "just allergic to opening up" is definitely half of the story or more, but it's also not the whole picture. The masses, and the distributors that can reach the masses, are also involved.
1: as in intellectual property, copyright, not the set of octets
2: the oft in-universe-named entity like "Julius Deane Import Export" shown in the copyright line
Many IP holders belong to a group like Kadokawa, which straight own several streaming platforms (dwango/niconico is a perfect example of this)
Other groups like DMM or Fuji already have their direct platform where they also stream their own content. Except they fiercely cut it from foreign registration.
They all already accept credit cards, and could further cut H content from foreign audiences if needed.
If they wanted to, they could open it internationaly tomorrow.
The subs are noticeably worse in a continuing trend. Maybe I am just now noticing it but in the dubs for the most recent shows it seems like the important subs for text (like important signs, etc) in a dub are also now missing and only come up if you turn subs on with the dub. Crunchyroll has clearly also done other things though that have impacted the experience. They started by removing comments and a year ago (?) and then added the -incredibly- annoying wipe to 'here watch this' that can't be avoided when a show ends and there isn't a next episode. We will see how they evolve. Are there any other actually good services out there? hidive has very limited content and a terrible interface. I don't know of anything with the catalogue that crunchyroll has.
> If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.”
I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
> I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
Yep, their srv3 format is very usable, although it is in many ways inferior to ASS (animations have to be done manually in discrete timesteps, although YTSubConverter does that for you I think, and no crazy stuff like shape drawing or 3d transforms). Does support ruby text though which ASS currently doesn't.
I think the worst thing about it is actually that YouTube is not doing very well in getting people to use it. For example they don't support most of the format's functionality in any client that isn't the web one[1]. Additionally I don't think there's even an official way to create these complex subtitles, you have to use unofficial tools like YTSubConverter.
If anyone is interested, I am working on a library for rendering srv3 (and some WebVTT) here[2]. Maybe if we had widespread support people would use it more? That seems like very wishful thinking though :)
[1] I suspect this is because they have to work within the constraints of whatever UI frameworks they're using for apps. It does not seem possible to implement compliant web text layout (pretty complicated!) on top of such higher level systems.
Are they just bad now? The one I noticed was the "Kingdom" which is several years old. It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and characters but the spoken language was Japanese. So the sub would say "General Mike is going to attack Houston" and the spoken Japanese would say "General Bob is going to attach Seattle" (fill in Mike and Houston with Chinese names and Bob and Seattle with Japaense names)
Oh that's interesting. I've subscribed and unsubscribed to Crunchyroll more than once on my TV when I try to watch something and then it seems to have garbage subtitles. Sadly, I keep forgetting and clicking on them in Prime Video.
I definitely wish we were back in the era of "keikaku means plan".
So I know this because I did some research on why the crunchyroll subs didn't work in the pip mode on firefox. So it turns out they used a substitute format called .ass, which as the article mentioned was created by AegisSubs.
This is not natively supported by browsers, so they used to import a wasm bundle for reading this file, rendering it on a Canvas that was overlayed on the Video.
So they did put a lot of effort in the making it work not only in the labour of the translation but also in supporting it technically.
Sadly it looks like they will be switching to more lackluster formats That don't support the advance positioning features.
> Multiple overlapping speakers are represented on the top and bottom of the screen.
> This level of attention to detail makes for a better viewing experience
Quality concerns aside, I've always disliked having text on the top and bottom of the screen simultaneously. My eyes are focused on the bottom of the screen, so I sometimes don't even realize that there's text at the top and have to pause/rewind to figure out what I missed.
I think putting both speakers' captions at the bottom with some kind of differentiator makes more sense.
This is really indicative of the people in charge at Crunchyroll not understanding their audience, as any serious anime fan can tell you that high quality subtitles have a huge effect on the enjoyability of an anime.
Colourful, expressive, well timed subs really add something to the experience.
> Most anime have exclusive streaming licenses, so for ~70% of 2025’s new releases, and an even larger share of catalog shows and movies, Crunchyroll is often your only means to do so. But that’s not an issue.
Strange to see an article describing the issue - degrading the subtitle quality, which affects all the content due to this licensing ~monopoly - while simultaneously rejecting its existence.
This is a random aside but somewhere I have some slightly obscure early 2000s anime with fan subs, and in one of them they accidentally left an additional “working notes” subtitle track that I find fascinating. It basically has all the little messages between the participants discussing whether a given translation is accurate or should be changed, alternative ideas, disagreements over proper translation, etc. It really illustrates how subtitling is nowhere near an exact science and oftentimes whether a given translation is the best is highly subjective. You basically need to be a good writer to be a good translator.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 72.8 ms ] threadAnd there's your answer. Bet they're replacing most of their artisinal subtitlers with AI.
In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc.
They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’.
I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.
A generous explanation would be that the localized subtitles under the Japanese audio are licensed for use with that audio only, but that’s pure conjecture, and even if that’s the case, there is no excuse for how terrible the captions can be.
If only. I wish they would stop localizing it. Just give me the raw episodes. It seems like every site outside of Japan insists on ruing it by putting English on top of it. Unfortunately the economics of the situation means that sites will server the interests of tourists instead of otaku, so it's unlikely to ever change.
look, buddy, anime is mainstream now
It wound up being quite a large document!
But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching English subs to Japanese dialogue. So what you have to do is have a human with some small grasp of Japanese place each of these in/out times by hand.
If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. But that’s ONLY if you don’t spend any extra time coloring and moving the subs around the screen (as you would song and sign captions).
Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”
Crunchy roll looks to have at least gone halfway for a while… but multiply those times across thousands of episodes over X years… and you can see why some manager somewhere finally decided 35 minutes was good enough.
I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move. Anime fans LOVE anime. The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. I really miss the excitement that my customers would get (and happily telegraph!) when I launched a product in those days. Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. Especially with a super fan base like you have in anime.
I mean I guess there's a very long tail of mediocre shows as well that get thousands of streams at best, but still.
Of course, the typesetting would take 8 hours, but timing was always easy.
- Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the translation through their players. That could be the toughest pill to swallow for Japanese production houses, many are just allergic to opening up, but that would be so great.
They could still license in specific countries (US?) or specific purposes (theatrical release, BD etc) provided it isn't exclusive.
- good translators would have a shot at asking for more money. Fans who don't give a damn could still get freeish half auto translated stuff, while the deeper fandom could support their people.
- "long tail" countries could get their translations as well. There's just no way CR ever does Zimbabwe subs, but a few hundreds of fans could pay some guy to make it for them against a canonical video file bought from the content owner. win-win.
What does it even mean? The IP[1] holding single-purpose LLCs[2] have no means of distribution on its own. They commission sweatshops and license the artifacts to TV stations and streaming services. They can sell to Western streaming services like Netflix or send in brochures to American TV stations, in case they're taking it, but if they aren't taking it, then they aren't taking it.
I guess they can set up an IP to be worldwide exclusive on nicovideo.jp and let anyone pay for nicovideo.jp Premium subscription through VISA. But how many is going to actually sign up and how long will VISA work if it worked?
Japanese companies being "just allergic to opening up" is definitely half of the story or more, but it's also not the whole picture. The masses, and the distributors that can reach the masses, are also involved.
1: as in intellectual property, copyright, not the set of octets
2: the oft in-universe-named entity like "Julius Deane Import Export" shown in the copyright line
Other groups like DMM or Fuji already have their direct platform where they also stream their own content. Except they fiercely cut it from foreign registration.
They all already accept credit cards, and could further cut H content from foreign audiences if needed.
If they wanted to, they could open it internationaly tomorrow.
I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
Yep, their srv3 format is very usable, although it is in many ways inferior to ASS (animations have to be done manually in discrete timesteps, although YTSubConverter does that for you I think, and no crazy stuff like shape drawing or 3d transforms). Does support ruby text though which ASS currently doesn't.
I think the worst thing about it is actually that YouTube is not doing very well in getting people to use it. For example they don't support most of the format's functionality in any client that isn't the web one[1]. Additionally I don't think there's even an official way to create these complex subtitles, you have to use unofficial tools like YTSubConverter.
If anyone is interested, I am working on a library for rendering srv3 (and some WebVTT) here[2]. Maybe if we had widespread support people would use it more? That seems like very wishful thinking though :)
[1] I suspect this is because they have to work within the constraints of whatever UI frameworks they're using for apps. It does not seem possible to implement compliant web text layout (pretty complicated!) on top of such higher level systems.
[2] https://github.com/afishhh/subrandr
Or rather, I am, but I'm still right about the subtitles.
I definitely wish we were back in the era of "keikaku means plan".
What's the point of writing a full article when the answer is literally in the eighth word?
> This level of attention to detail makes for a better viewing experience
Quality concerns aside, I've always disliked having text on the top and bottom of the screen simultaneously. My eyes are focused on the bottom of the screen, so I sometimes don't even realize that there's text at the top and have to pause/rewind to figure out what I missed.
I think putting both speakers' captions at the bottom with some kind of differentiator makes more sense.
Colourful, expressive, well timed subs really add something to the experience.
Strange to see an article describing the issue - degrading the subtitle quality, which affects all the content due to this licensing ~monopoly - while simultaneously rejecting its existence.
Less money to pay for quality.