Crunchyroll Issues Statement About Video Quality Issues

Crunchyroll is one of the biggest providers of anime streaming in the world, with over 800 shows in their online catalog. Recently the site has had some backlash from fans because of a apparent drop of video quality. Many paying users were frustrated and started dropping their subscriptions because of the radio silence from the company. Today, Crunchyroll provided an official statement regarding this feedback on video quality issues. The statement is as follows:

"Crunchyroll is always working towards serving the highest possible video quality to our users. To keep up with our growing audience and the many ways people are consuming anime, we've been working on a new infrastructure to better support the viewing experience.

Last weekend, new episodes were released through the new infrastructure to test the system's ability to serve video to large portions of the Crunchyroll audience. The encodes that some users experienced were not up to the standards of our previous system, nor up to the standards we demand from ourselves. While we had previously identified issues with the encodes, solutions for a broad rollout require us to first move completely to the new infrastructure. Going forward, you will see that we have updated the video experience for simulcasts and new episodes within the new infrastructure. This means you will experience an improved encode for future releases on the new infrastructure, which will no longer use the lower quality encodes after any amount of time. For anyone who wants further technical detail on our encodes, our engineers will be releasing a blog post shortly. As the transition to this new infrastructure is complete, we will re-encode all of our catalog with this higher quality.

Please know that it will never be Crunchyroll's intention to lessen the viewing experience. In cases like this we're grateful users reached out to us and provided feedback about the issue. We appreciate the patience with our efforts and will continue working to bring an improved viewing experience across Crunchyroll."

For some this satisfied their concerns and worry, while other skeptics are waiting for actions before they get too hopeful. Overall it seems that the company really does care about their audience and are working to better the system and resources behind the ways they deliver anime to the masses. Maybe next time they should just be more transparent before hand, rather than after issues occur.