Anime on Demand

» see anime-on-demand.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Anime on Demand was German-speaking-only at the licensing layer, which is a sentence that meant something very specific if you lived anywhere else. The catalog existed. The player worked. Load it from a Turkish address in 2010 and you got a message explaining that this content was not available in your region. For most of the world the legal anime service was a rumor about a website you could not open.

It opened on 7 September 2007 in Berlin, put together by AV Visionen, a distributor that already had German rights to a pile of titles and no good way to show them to anyone. It was the first legal anime streaming service in German-speaking countries, arriving a full year before Crunchyroll went legitimate and stopped being a piracy site. Over the next fourteen years the catalog passed 500 titles, most available with either a German dub or the Japanese track.

VIZ Media Europe bought it in 2009. Sony bought VIZ Media Europe in 2019 and folded it into the anime business it was assembling out of Funimation and Crunchyroll. By 2021 the service was owned by a company called Crunchyroll EMEA, which is a strange position for a competitor to end up in.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The thing worth remembering about 2007 is what the alternative was. Anime reached most of the world through fansub groups and BitTorrent trackers, translated by volunteers who often did a better job than the licensed release and always did it faster. Paying for anime outside Japan mostly meant buying a DVD box six months late, if a company had bothered to license it for your country at all.

Anime on Demand was an argument that this could be a normal business. Subscribe and press play, and the show is there in your own language. The argument worked well enough in Germany that the service lasted longer than most of what came after it. The catch was that it worked only in the German-speaking countries, because rights were sold territory by territory and nobody was selling worldwide.

~ what it became ~

The shutdown was announced in September 2021 with three months of notice. On 8 December 2021 the site went off and a large part of the program catalog, German dubs included, moved across to Crunchyroll. Anyone holding a monthly package that ran past the closing date got the remaining days back as a voucher for a Crunchyroll Mega Fan subscription.

As deaths go this is the gentle kind. Nothing was lost and nobody was cheated. The shows kept playing under a different logo the next morning. What ended was the idea that a German distributor should run its own storefront for German viewers. That job now belongs to one company operating in a hundred countries at once, which is the outcome the fansubbers were accidentally asking for in 2003.

~ the long tail ~

There was a second Anime on Demand, unrelated except by name and ownership. Kazé launched one for the United Kingdom and Ireland in April 2011, with Manga Entertainment and MVM among the partner distributors, carrying simulcasts of Steins;Gate and Tiger & Bunny. It announced its closure in December 2013 and got folded into Animax UK, lasting under three years against the German original's fourteen.

Two services, one name, both dead, both absorbed by something larger. The German one is the one worth the grave because it proved the model first and outlasted almost everyone who copied it. Its reward for that was being bought by the winner and quietly switched off.

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