Archive for: site review

Crunchyroll: Watch Free Anime Online

Crunchyroll was born in 2006, hosting a mix of user submitted and site provided anime clips, many of which were uploaded without rights holders permission, although infringing videos were usually removed by site admin. Despite this somewhat bumpy start, Crunchyroll quickly gained a vast userbase, climbing into Alexa’s top 200 within 2 years of its conception, and got funded at the beginning of last year (March) by Venrock (a California based venture capital firm) to the tune of about $4 million USD.

A stricter approach to copyright infringement and the weight of their user base and a newly cut, seven figure cheque behind them meant that they were able to secure content licensing deals with Japanese providers, bringing exclusive and simulcast content over from Japan to their largely American audience. They now stream and broadcast only content to which they have legitimate license, and operate a membership program to get access to content earlier than it’s normally available for streaming, and to watch high-def versions of videos.

I think this is a great example of a site managing to turn popular appeal into a solid business model in the icanhascheezburger.com mould. Take a pretty unique type of content, build a user base, and exploit that user base hard and fast, while trimming away any hint of illegality. Skating the Web 2.0 copyright infringment maelstrom for a while might be dangerous, but once you’ve got the traffic, then you’ve got bargaining power, and if you can get some financial backing, or really get on top of your advertising proposition then the rewards can be huge.

Muziic – Playlists from YouTube’s Catalogue

There’s a whole host of music streaming solutions out there now; Last.FM, Spotify, SeeqPod, SongBird. All of them trying to carve out a little niche in the rapidly changing online music market. Any new player in the market has really got to stand out in terms of content and user experience if it hopes to get any kind of traction.

So how does Muzzic differ from it’s competitors, and how does it hope to gain users’ loyalty? They’ve got the content issue fairly well covered; their program crawls YouTube’s catalogue, logging all the songs by title and artist. The search seems pretty comprehensive – even odd little things like Kutiman’s Thru You series, and Swede Mason’s hilarious oddities are recognised.

There’s also a little sidebar to browse user’s upload channels by genre – this is pretty limited though, and there’s no way of knowing what you’re going to find in one particular person’s upload list. They work fairly well as mini radio stations or preset playlists though. You can build your own playlists, a single track at a time, or pick tracks to play from your search results. Muziic’s player also brings down the video for whatever you might be watching and plays it in a tiny little window next to the progress bar.

So is it any good? It’s better than last.fm for the fact that you can pick your own specific tracks, rather than have to listen to something like what you had in mind, but essentially it’s like a miniature version of a YouTube quicklist, nothing massively innovative, and more limited than SongBird in that it only draws down from YouTube – a massive catalogue,  granted, but not compared to pulling down tracks from the whole web, especially now YouTube has vowed to take down all the content from PRS artists. Not having any audio ads is nice, but the playlist management is so much more comprehensive and cool on Spotify that I’d bear Roberta whining on at me, as well as their more limited catalogue for the privilige of playing through my search results and not having to add tracks to a list one at a time. There’s no music discovery functionality, and worst of all, the tracks occasionally just stop playing for no reason.

All in all a nice try, and probably worth experimenting with before you go back to Spotify.