Are there others that are newer on the market that I should checkout?
Not really looking to pirate because I don’t really know what to look for, so I feel I need a service to help with recommendations and finding new shows.
Also, I’m using ‘best’ to mean most accessible to a casual viewer, and largest library of English-dubbed shows.
AFAIK they bought their only real competition (funimation). Regarding recommendations: I personally find piracy streaming sites have the best recommendations, I mostly use them just for recommendations and don’t even watch there, also you could take a look at !anime@ani.social, specifically the recommendation threads
Other way around, funimation bought them and now it’s wearing crunchyroll’s skin while refusing to honor all the digital copies funimation had previously sold people because “crunchyroll doesn’t have that feature”.
You should checkout secondhand shops for anime DVDs you can get some good quality ones
Yes but what do you play them in? Disc players in general are almost as rare as VCRs these days. Last time I had a Blu Ray/DVD player or drive was sometime around 2011. Don’t know anyone who has one, either. Everybody just streams everything now, and has for quite some time.
Best paid anime streaming service is a VPN and pirating everything tbh.
Idk what to watch. There’s too many.
Having it all in a library and trying interesting titles without the energy and effort of taking forever to torrent or downloading the wrong dub in 720p and having to do it again.
I wait for a new season to start (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter); go onto MyAnimeList a couple of days after - then sort by rating, then anything that looks interesting in the first page, I watch. If I get bored or run out of things to watch, I go further down the page and pick more things.
There are ways to …automate this… but I think people were getting in trouble here for those communities.
Trash Guides, Sonarr, Nyaa…is all I’m saying.
The only other one I know is hidive. It carries some different shows than Crunchyroll.
Unfortunately hidive’s user experience is complete garbage. It doesn’t even have functional “continue watching” that will show you when new episodes are added
Technically it may be, in terms of library.
However there are a few alternatives to look into that, while not matching the scale of their library, still have enough to consider.
For older anime there’s Retrocrush, which offers a fair amount of shows to watch for free (but with ads), no account required. Some are only accessible with an account and via subscription, however.
Interestingly though, some of those shows are available on other services no subscription required, like Tubi or Pluto.
Speaking of, it turns out Crunchyroll apparently cut a deal with Pluto, so there’s a Crunchyroll channel on there where you can catch some of their anime freely (again, with ads though). Besides that there’s also a separate anime channel and a few dedicated marathon channels to more popular series like Naruto, One Piece, Sailor Moon, etc.
There’s also lower amounts still to be found on the other general streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, but it obviously doesn’t fully compare.
Also while not newer and their library is way smaller, for some anime movies you might see if your local libraries offer digital services like Hoopla or Kanopy. With those you may be able to check out some great anime movies.
