Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
I bailed on CR when they fired their US based IT people and outsourced to the cheapest Eastern Euro country. It wasn’t even a purely moral decision. The website was janky in the first place and I knew it wasn’t going to get batter at that point.
So non-Americans can’t do a good job, amirite?
I didn’t get that vibe from the parent comment. the reaction was to the motivations of the rich fatcats who aren’t happy with the obscene wealth they already have. Not American Exceptionalism.
especially if they arnt familiar with the tech.