No, I am not crazy. I am sure most out there would wonder why does someone wants an anime streaming service when the usual practice for anime collectors in Malaysia would just to download an anime title of their liking from torrent sites and then keep them inside their hard disk. Honestly there is nothing wrong with that (figure of speech, as you ARE actually doing something wrong by pirating) but I honestly think it’s a good time to introduce a change in the local culture here. More after the jump

The anime boom in Malaysia can be traced back to the introduction of a faster and more reliable broadband connection in Malaysia. I still remember that I started with dial up and it was a chore to get even

one episode in a day. Things change when Streamyx was first introduced. Not only the downloads became faster but also huge files that were not an option on dial up became the de-facto files to get. Fans started to share with one another as well and more and more people were introed to this culture [citation needed]

Years on, broadband has became faster, and most people even have broadbands on their smartphones. Most of the people that started watching anime years ago have grown up and most are now working and can afford paying a bit more for faster connections. File size has also ballooned up though the years. If once 100MB was the norm, now it’s not weird to see files reaching up to the 500MB region. And in turn that leads to them upgrading their hard disk drives as well and it’s not uncommon to see these collectors having disk spaces in the terabytes.

So what’s wrong with this? Nothing actually, as I can also be considered as one of these “collectors”. Why do I use that term anyways? Since it’s literal. After finally joining the working world, I found out that while I can download the files to my heart content, most of them will end up in the hard disk without me ever watching it due to me not having time to actually watch what I download. So in the end I ending up “collecting” most of the titles and forgetting that I even have them. And it’s a common occurrence with other people at my age as well. Not only that, the sizes of these titles are taking a toll on my hard disk drives as well.

Sometime last year, we had the chance to preview CrunchyRoll, an anime streaming service from the USA. While the titles were limited (can’t really complain since I was testing out it’s free service) it was quite smooth, something that you don’t really expect from a video streaming from the USA. While the stream was not 720p, it’s still sharp enough for you to see the detail and didn’t hinder the viewing experience at all. The service was quite a success, with number of subscribers and even having rights to show titles from the current season.

Would this same system work locally? Why not? I mean that even with an overseas server, it can stream smooth videos, so a local server would in theory can even stream smooth videos in 720p. I am sure you have watched 720p videos on youtube before and it loads smoothly. That’s because youtube (even before the introduction of Youtube KoreaMalaysia) has local cache servers in Malaysia. If 720p is not an option, then you could bump down to a reso that is smoother to load.

Smartphone users can also now watch animes on the go. While smartphones in theory can play a normal downloaded file, most of the time the newly introduced h264 10 bit encode won’t work on all processors and you need to convert it before you can watch it smoothly. With all telcos now using HSPA+ with speed reaching up to 22Mb (in theory, although uMobile are saying theirs can reach up to 42Mb) a person could easily stream an anime of his choosing on the go no matter where they are.

You are also no longer relying on your hard disk drive as well, thus you don’t need to spend much to get more storage. And as the files are at the streaming site’s server, there is no more issues of your hard disk drive having problems, and you loosing all of your collected stuffs. Heck it makes a better file sorting option.

But what’s most important is that you are actually contributing something back to the studio. An official licensed stream would mean that what you pay would mostly go for the payment of the license, compared to what most anime fans are doing taking for granted digital data is free. Time to finally pay back to all those years you are stealing from them don’t you think?

*Note: Editorials is just a personal view from the editors and does not reflect the view of the community itself