Gonzo to Stream Anime Simulanteously with Airing in Japan
 

Gonzo has announced that it's going to stream two of its newest shows, The Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter on the same day that they're aired on Japanese television. These streams will appear on sites like YouTube, BOST and CrunchyRoll in Japanese with English subtitles. As far as I know, this is the first time that any animation company has attempted something like this. (ANN)

The point of this action is, of course, to fight against illegal downloading of anime. Do you think it'll work? Or are people going to ignore the streams and download these shows anyway? And I wonder who they got to subtitle it: professionals or a fansub group?

I'm glad that Gonzo has taken the first step towards closing the gap between the exposure of anime in Japan and elsewhere, especially since they were the most vocal company regarding fansubbing and iillegal anime distribution. I personally hope that anime fans embrace this experiment so that other companies have incentive to follow suit. I'm not sure how this will affect the potential sales of these shows in the West, however.

What are your opinions on this?

I think this is a swell idea, and something I was hoping would happen soon for most animes. No one wants to wait a year for a show to go through all that paper work and licencing just so they can get that first DVD volume containing only 3-4 episodes, and then have to wait for monthes to complete the set.

Letting us stream legally allows us to enjoy the anime with little wait from the JP broadcast. My only concern is the subs.

This is pretty much the only way they can kill off fansubbing. Start with the streaming, and maybe pay fansub translators to put English subs up. That would work. Ideally there would be two options. The first would be a free streaming service, supported by ads. The second would be a monthly subscription to the uninterrupted streams.

I'm not really interested in the quality of streaming. If they offered a iTunes like download capacity it would be a different story. But right now there is no way I'm going to give up the 720p h.264 encodes coming from most fansub groups to watch some streaming feeds.

Ahahaha, man. Well at least they'll be streaming something that's incredibly pretty!

If people do take interest, maybe it'll do something for the troubled R1 market.