Crunchyroll responds to recent video quality issues

If you weren't loitering on social media at the weekend, you may have missed something of a storm which erupted around streaming service Crunchyroll, and more specifically the quality of videos being offered by them.

On Saturday, users began to report that a number of new simulcasts were launched with a far lower bitrate (and thus lower video quality) than is normally expected from the service - this led to further investigation and suggestions that the software versions and settings being used by Crunchyroll had been altered.

By the following morning, the core issue had been fixed and the affected episodes replaced with videos boasting the usual quality of simulcasts. However, the controversy has rumbled on, with further suggestions emerging that higher quality, higher bitrate videos are only made available to users for the first 24 hours of availability - after that point, lower bitrate versions are switched in their stead. In other words, unless you watch a simulcast on day of release you're receiving a worse viewing experience than both those who watched the episode on the same day, and those watching the episode via non-legal means.

The core problem - and the accusations leveled at Crunchyroll - can be found in this Medium post. Although unfortunately the loudest voices in researching the issue are also those from the fansubbing community who have historically had an axe to grind with the legal streaming service (and the tone of the piece is nothing if not inflammatory), the methodolody and research appears sound.

In response to the growing outcry to these allegations, Crunchyroll themselves last night posted the following statement:

"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."

Although official word on the issues at hand is welcome, this initially vague statement leaves us unclear as to exactly why videos are being switched to a lower quality encode for users who don't watch a simulcast on day of release, but does seem to promise that this practice will stop at some point in the future.

For our part, we'll certainly be keeping a close eye on Crunchyroll's video quality and any future statements they make pertaining to the viewing experience, and we certainly hope that this is indeed a blip in their shift to newer, better technologies to improve, rather than reduce, video quality.

Do you have any thoughts on this issue? How important is video quality to your anime streaming experience? We'd love to hear your feedback in the comments section below.

UPDATE (16/03/2017): Ellation - the company behind Crunchyroll - have now published their promised update regarding video quality, the issues experiences which brought about this discussion, and their plans moving forward. Here's a taster:

Crunchyroll old video infrastructure encoder quality used a flat bitrate (ABR) across all episodes and series. This resulted in a one size fits all for every show where episodes used a fixed bitrate to meet quality expectations. Similar to Netflix’s transition to per content encoding, Ellation has started moving to more variable bitrates and per content constant quality (CRF) settings. This transition enables bandwidth constrained consumers on mobile devices to experience much higher video quality since video bitrate is not artificially constrained to high value as with the old video encoding infrastructure. As outlined in the samples below, some complex scenes could use more bitrate than Crunchyroll old video encoding infrastructure had allocated them. With this new encoding scheme we will continue to refine and ensure a high level quality in a much broader set of content scenarios.

You can read the full update and more details over at this Medium post.