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
Can you DM me some site recommendations that you use to find your shows?
You should checkout secondhand shops for anime DVDs you can get some good quality ones
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
Dang. Sounds like CrunchyRoll is still the market monopoly.
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.
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.
Thanks! This is super helpful. I appreciate your comment. I haven’t checked in a long time and the last anime dedicated streaming service I remember is CruchyRoll, and it seems it’s still the main one on the market. I really like the local library idea.
Between Netflix and Hulu I don’t find myself lacking dubbed anime, so could just try those if you already have them. Isn’t Crunchy Roll almost entirely subbed stuff, anyways?
I used to have a CrunchyRoll sub but since I caught up with Overlord I cancelled it.
At the moment I’m watching Sakamoto Days and Dan Da Dan which are both on Netflix so haven’t had to resub to crunchyroll yet.
