I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move

> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! It's wild to hear someone - especially someone in the industry - say that. Fans definitely bring the most enthusiasm to their work, but fan subs are notorious for mistranslations and awkward hyperliteralism.

> Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.” 3-4 hours of time for a sub must be a rounding error for the production costs of these shows. No?

How many customers watch each episode of popular shows? 100k+? And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?

See also unanimated's typesetting guide: https://unanimated.github.io/ts/index.htm

I sampled a couple of shows on Netfix and I couldn't find any anime subtitled in English; just closed-captioning of the English dub. Netflix's selection I would describe as "fine," so the quality of the subtitles is, IMO a big differentiator for Crunchyroll and given that my household is looking to reduce the streaming services, this change makes the decision of "which one" a lot easier.

>Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. And yet I can't think of a single large corporation that actually has this mindset anymore. The current mindset of management is that any delight your customers take in the product is a sign that either the price should have been higher or costs cut until the product is merely satisfactory rather than delightful.

> The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. except that it doesn't show up as revenue. That's where the problem is - people would obviously prefer to have elite tier subs, but not be willing to pay elite tier prices for it.

> 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.” Cannot overstate this enough. Fans are the ones who actually care. To an almost pathological degree. Anime fansubbing is a major reason why our video players even have excellent subtitling support to begin with. Many music fans will obssess over ripping quality and lossless encodings to the point of delusion. I've seen people care so much about some film they they somehow spliced together two different blu-rays to make the ultimate version because some parts were better on the disc from a specific region. Star Wars fans cared so much they spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to resurrect negatives from the 70s that even the creator himself had disowned: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/Project-4K77/ Always bet on guys …