Anime Diet

Now that’s more like it. From Anime News Network:

Anime Network, A.D. Vision‘s television channel in the United States, has begun streaming Gainax‘s hit Gurren Lagann series online for free with English subtitles.Gurren Lagann‘s streaming is part of the official opening of Anime Network’s broadband service today. The streaming also launches Anime Network’s First Look effort, which presents new series that have yet to be released on North American home video. As one new episode ofGurren Lagann is added each week, at least two archived episodes will remain online for people who missed a week. 

Mike’s take:  this, friends, is a big part of the future of getting TV anime to fans; ADV is clearly taking a page from NBC, Hulu.com, and other American TV network ventures in putting up recent episodes for free by streaming online. The best thing about this is that it’s, at last, subtitled rather than dubbed too. And it happens before the DVD release. No, it’s not as fast as we would like as Gurren Lagann has already finished, but that may be out of the hands of the American side of the equation. I suppose ADV out of all the major American anime distributors is also the only one big enough to have the resources to take this kind of chance. Hats off to you, ADV! I will be following Gurren Lagann, which I foolishly put on hold long ago, in this way. (I may even blog it.)

I would like to see someone start a streaming subscription service along these lines in the near future–for, say, $5/month, you can watch all the anime you want subtitled, not just recent episodes (which should be free like it is here) but everything. For one it’d keep the review flow of this blog going. :) Offer downloads alongside it for $2 per episode with no DRM, and it’d be perfect.

Edit: Tried 3 different Mac browsers (Safari, Camino, Firefox), and none of them work for Gurren Lagann. The ads seem to play, though. I’ll try again tomorrow. Anybody got it working, say, in Internet Explorer? (I don’t have access to Windows at the moment.)