My dear friends at Funimation,
Once upon a time, the Ford Motor Company built airplanes. To be more precise, Ford bought the Stroud airplane company and proceeded to produce one of there designs as the Ford Trimotor. it is regarded as an aviation classic. However, once the Trimotor became obsolete Ford ceased producing airplanes. Why is that? Ford builds good cars, they aren't an airplane company. They could not come up with a design to follow on after the trimotor. The moral of this story is to do what you are good at and let others do what they are good at.
Funimation, you are very good at localizing anime for the English speaking world. You are not, However, any good at streaming the same on the internet. I don't need to list the issues, you know what they are. You've heard enough of the complaints. As i write this, once again streaming is not working on the site. I'll just say that Funimation is not serving their streaming subscription customers well. The question at hand is.... What to do about it? (see the moral above) Funimation, I humbly suggest you let another company, one which is good at internet streaming to handle streaming your product. It does not take an internet nerd to figure out that Funimation already has a relationship with Hulu. Your commercial supported content is obviously hosted by Hulu. One can certainly recognize the announcer for the "brought to you by" clips is the same. anyone who watches Hulu as well would recognize it.
Two scenarios come to mind to resolve this situation.
1. Continue Funimation.com and subscription service as is but port the streaming hosting to Hulu or another reliable provider. I'm sure a mutually beneficial arrangement can be made. As noted above the technology exists.
2. Close the Elite Subscription service and license all your content to a third party subscription provider such as Hulu+ or NetFlix and keep Funimation.com as a storefront for your physical product.
I have been a long time customer of Funimation. I've purchased dozens of titles on DVD and subscibed to the Elite Streaming service almost from it's inception. It just saddens me to see how tragically your streaming service has turned out despite our patience waiting for you to figure it out. Please, please, put an end to this misery.
From what I've gathered, Hulu's service doesn't seem to really have a truly ad-free plan. Add to that the fact that outsourcing the subscription plan to another company is likely to significantly reduce the profit coming into FUNimation. FUNi has been getting better at setting up simulcasts, but they really do need to find a web application framework that suits their needs, and that does not seem to be Drupal.
And while the idea to work with another company to provide streaming video content on FUNi's behalf sounds like a foolproof plan, that was already attempted with NicoNico, and the collaboration quietly fell apart after only a season or two of simulcasting, with N^2 merging back with their parent company not long afterwards.
Oh yes Hulu CAN run ad free content. They just generally don't. I have seen ad-free content before hosted on Hulu+ before. As for the profit issue, yes you will give away a chunk of the pie, but sometimes that is better than ruining your reputation.
Ad free content has to be paid for on Hulu, so Funi would not only be losing the ad revenue and Elite Subscription income (not to mention the larger amount of visitors that come to Funimation.com, but then they would have to pay more as well.) Doing all that as well as licensing the shows to stream (you have to remember they do not do a full license for each property, sometimes they only license the stream) there would be no money in it for them whatsoever, and it would most likely cause them to just lose money. Id say they just feel they are to far financially invested in what they have done so far with drupal to drop it and try to go with a fully different implementation.
Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.- Steven Wright
Being an IT professional, as well as a computer scientist, I am certainly amazed at how poorly the streaming is handled. At first I figured that Funimation simply didn't have the data pipe for it, but now I am starting to believe that it may be their servers (which also tends to mean their architectural design). If this is true, the cost for them to fix this may be enough to cause internal problems, which might be why they do not fix the problem.
Please Funimation, be better than you are. Please at least be greater than sub standard... I pay, but can never seem to watch.
Point 1 - Subscription streams on Funimation.com do not have ads so there is no ad revenue to lose. Non-subscription streams on Funimation.com are already Hosted by Hulu with ads. (and are working this weekend by the way - try logging out of your account then start say, an Ah! My Goddess! Episode. The Hulu player will start ) As far as Elite Subscription Revenue, sure they would have to pass most of it along to Hulu, But they would also save money by getting rid of the clunky servers and generate MORE elite subscriptions with a service that works!
Point 2 - Loss of site hits? Not if they do it the same way they do the non-subscription streams. The subscriber would still click on the desired video on Funimation.com.
Point 3. if Funimation holds streaming rights to a title, it matters not on whose servers the content is hosted on. It only matters that Funimation controls access. For that matter it's most likely that Funimation does not own the servers the content is now housed on.
Point 4. "We paid too much for this boat to abandon ship!" "But Sir, there's a 30 foot breach in the hull, we're taking water on fast and it's listing 15 degrees to port and we're on fire." Funimation.com streaming is a sinking ship. It's time to call the Coast Guard.
Dear Funimation, the new movie called Dragonball Z Battle of the Gods has been released in Japan on March 30th, 2013. I'm hoping to see some dates on when you are going to translate the movie into English. Also, why wasn't the movie played in american theaters in Japanese. I'm sure many people would rather see it in English, but still, if it will take awhile to make it in English, I'm sure many people wouldn't mind to see it in Japanese in american theaters. I hope my request is taken under consideration.
Thanks.
^Nice April fools day joke.