As we look at usage of that and the number of people that were redeeming those and using them, it was just not a feature that was available in Crunchyroll and isn’t in our roadmap.

I'll translate corporate dickhead for those in need.

"We determined that the number of people who would be impacted would be low enough to avoid real blowback, so we decided to fuck those people in the Crunchyroll with a rusty Buster Sword because really, who cares what some anime nerd thinks anyway?"

Ideally, they would be forced to honor the "forever" promise in perpetuity. Alternately, forcing them to issue physical copies of equivalent quality to every impacted customer for every title they were to have "forever" access to would be reasonable. Plus, you know, a massive 'acting like complete dicks' penalty for trying to pull this nonsense.

I'm a bit confused by the title, which says

could be good, if it works

but the second half of the article lays out how access to digital anime can disappear.

Where's the good? The hope that good or equal value will be given? Is that still good when you lose other anime you already had?

I just got a blue ray of samurai champloo - mostly because I'm sick of media in general cycling through multiple streaming services only to become unavailable.

The SC blue ray came with a digital copy from funimation (now crunchyroll). I saw online that it's basically a scam that doesn't work so to see for myself I created a paid account to hopefully get access to the digital download.

I found out it was unsupported, and at best it would only be available online and with an account - no opportunity for actual download/ownership.

So I immediately cancelled subscription and had them fully delete my account. I figured complaining about their shit policy by cancelling a paid service and fully deleting an account would hit some metrics at least.

When there's a show/movie I really enjoy, I either buy physical, or torrent so I actually have it. Only some things on the internet are forever, and with the volume of content being created, "permanent" is now often only for a few months before it becomes nearly impossible to find again.

that is why piracy is good for preservation

I mean, it could be bad as well. There isn't even really any specific solution announced.

Time to sail the high seas.

TLDR; After interviewing the president of Crunchyroll and getting absolutely nowhere with a test free account with 'forever' digital content it appears neither Crunchyroll nor The Verge knows how they are going to handle this. The title appears to be the most positive way to summarize the situation as possible.

Summary:

The author doesn't know what Crunchyroll is going to offer to make this up to customers, had issues with trying to get an answer for their own account's content and Crunchyroll's response has been fairly ambiguous but it seems they want to handle it on a case-by-case basis. Things like perhaps premium subscription discounts were mentioned. Allowing some sort of limited-time download was not mentioned. It is clear that there is no plan to make this content available the same way on Crunchyroll going forward.

The author used a free account that has two 'forever' digital content and they received canned responses from customer service seemingly after this interview with Crunchyroll's president. When asking Crunchyroll about that afterwards, the author was given a special link for all customers to use. So far there has been no further customer service response.

There is no definitive answer as to the solution and it is unlikely to be 'good' based on the comments from Crunchyroll so far.

Buy physical. Because you have a physical backup, you can watch it without Internet, and they can’t change the media. Like removing scenes or episodes.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“[We] are working really hard directly with each [customer] to ensure that they have an appropriate value for what they got in the digital copy initially,” Purini tells Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel during this week’s Decoder podcast.

When asked on Decoder why customers were going to lose their digital libraries, Purini had a clear answer: “As we look at usage of that and the number of people that were redeeming those and using them, it was just not a feature that was available in Crunchyroll and isn’t in our roadmap.”

I received two emails that were essentially the same boilerplate customer service response apologizing for the inconvenience but not providing any kind of solution to my issue.

In my most recent communication with Funimation customer service, I explained that because I have a free account, I will no longer be able to watch Steins;Gate digitally since that show requires a premium subscription.

The Verge reached out to Crunchyroll public relations to clarify how exactly the company was working with its customers to provide an “appropriate value” for their digital libraries and if this was something it is actively doing right now or something to come in the future.

That same month, it also announced that it would remove a host of Discovery shows from users’ libraries due to expiring content licensing arrangements before reversing that decision.

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