The Aniwave Shutdown Situation Explained

Early this morning, multiple big named anime piracy sites were shut down. Why were they shutdown? We don't entirely know, but here are all the facts we know about.

Thumbnail:
Join this channel to get access to perks:

Everything I've ever been wrong about:

[IanNBF]

Never forget that Crunchyroll ALSO started out as a piracy site & had the audacity to ask for payment while doing this.

[LJ-hktv]

-They load faster
-They have playspeed options
-They have comment sections
-They have watchtogether features
-They have hardcoded subs
-They have shows that paid sites don't
-No region restrictions
-Animators don't get paid either way

[allinss]

Nothing beats 2010s YouTube piracy when we had to watch a single episode in three part segments within an hour of the episode airing before it was taken down

[Tobithecomic]

Crunchyroll experience:
-Slow load times
-Translation issues
-"Unavailable in your region"
-Doesnt have everything to begin with
-No comments
-No watch together
-Price that keeps increasing, with worse service

Experience on the seven seas:
-Fast load times
-Backup servers
-Better translation
-More content
-Watch together features
-Comments
-No price change since it's free

[DivineDivinity]

I used aniwave because it was the LARGEST catalog of anime in one place. Corporations just throw out media like yesterday's garbage because they think everything has an "expiration date". Piracy sites are the only thing keeping titles like those alive, and what the DMCA people think they're doing is actually just hurting the community more by causing media to become lost, since those sites are the only places where the titles are hosted anymore.

Aniwave had a RARE censored version of a Cowboy Bebop special only aired in Japan that's probably lost now due to the takedown. The entire thing was recorded on a VCR and had multiple episodes compiled into one and modified to censor certain topics and events (mostly gun scenes). It wasn't until two years later, the fully uncensored version of Cowboy Bebop was aired on Japanese television.

[machodgdon]

The fact that Aniwave, Zoro, and Anix all went down at the same time just tells me this was a coordinated attack

[goldenangel]

I will never stop sailing the high seas who's with me

[hrnsnfhsjddhsjfnsmjdjsd-xsse]

AniWave/9anime was the KissAnime of today.

[danielcadilha]

Aniwave was offering anime not found on other sites. They also had English dubs for anime that was only in Japanese on paid sites.

[rimuru]

"if purchasing isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing."

brothers and sisters we must NOT allow ourselves to "purchase" something we can't own.

[sideoldtype]

"Cut off one head, two more grows back."
Piracy will not be purge until their streaming services improved.

[DrKarmo]

Sorry corpos but the piracy WON'T stop!

[leadhail]

Aniwave was Ideal in anime Streaming, Mostly Stable and had all you could ask for.

[derpymule]

The really odd thing to me is that obviously, this takedown doesn’t do jack to piracy rates. It was never going to. But genuinely sizeable amounts of time and effort were put into these takedowns for basically no gain besides pissing off the community even more.

So… why? As little as I think of these companies, I can’t bring myself to believe they genuinely thought it would improve the situation. But if they knew it wouldn’t be profitable financially, the only other motivation I can think of is that they actually just did it out of spite. And it’s ludicrous to me that a group this large and influential would act like that. There is no scenario where this looks anything less than moronic from these companies, and I hate that this is the world we live in.

[sheepandotter]

I used piracy sites and not crunchy roll because I had 12 ads on one episode, per every 10 minutes. (24 ads per episode, with each ad lasting from 30 seconds to a minute.)

[Kratosis-vfuy]

Spotify made accessing music legally a lot easier than pirating to the point pirating music just doesn't make sense. Crunchyroll makes you just want to pirate out of spite

[daymianhogue]

Rip aniwave, I used to be a Crunchyroll customer... But regularly had technical difficulties with the player being a piece of crap, and then at one point they accidentally double billed me, took almost a month to refund the obvious error, then double billed me the next month again...

The Gabe Newell quote is extremely accurate, like Jesus Christ, I'd rather Aniwave have just done whatever it took to become legal, and paid $10/month for it

[poptheweasel]

It's honestly insane how inconvenient paying for the real thing is nowadays over pirating it. Modern corporations are so consumer hostile and yet act surprised when people start just pirating anime instead.

[stefand]

yeah im not buying cruchyroll to watch "the time i got reincarnated as my crush's panties"
70% of anime is region gated and you can't watch anything without paying even more for a vpn, the animators are underpaid ANYWAY

[KaruSnep]

Pirating an anime does not harm the animators, nor does it even leave an itch on the super megacorps that mistreat said animators.
Your money is better spent on what you need or supporting much smaller creators/indie animators where your money actually matters and isnt used to fund someones 3rd lambo