Daisuki

» see daisuki.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Anime came to Turkey through television first and through fansubs after that. Nobody i knew was paying a Japanese site for legal simulcasts in 2013, and the licensed services mostly did not sell to this region anyway. Daisuki is a grave i am writing from the outside, and the reason it interests me has nothing to do with the catalog. It is a rare case of the people who make a thing trying to distribute it themselves, in public, with their names on the company.

The announcement came on 27 February 2013. Asatsu-DK, an advertising agency, put it together with Toei Animation and five more Japanese production and advertising firms. The plan was a single streaming site for fans outside Japan, with episodes going up close to their domestic broadcast and a store selling merchandise next to them. It was supposed to launch in April. It landed on 15 May.

A year later the ownership got heavier. Anime Consortium Japan was formed in November 2014 to run it, funded by Bandai Namco alongside the original partners and by the Cool Japan Fund, which is the Japanese state's investment vehicle for exporting culture. So this was not only an industry project. Public money was in it, with a policy goal attached.

What the money bought was a service that was consistently a step behind the American one. Crunchyroll had started in 2006 as a piracy site and gone legitimate, and it spent seven years learning what overseas anime viewers actually wanted before Daisuki opened its doors.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was for ~

The pitch to the studios was that the middleman was the problem. Licensing your show to a foreign streaming service means giving away the audience relationship and taking a fee, and if you own the pipe you keep both. It is the same argument every content company makes before it discovers what running a consumer service costs.

The pitch to viewers was thinner. Daisuki had good titles from its owners' catalogs, which is exactly what you get when seven rights holders build something together: their own shows, and not their competitors'. Whoever wants to watch anime wants all of it in one place, and a service assembled out of shareholder catalogs is the one thing that structurally cannot offer that.

~ the cracks ~

The Chernin Group took a majority stake in Crunchyroll in December 2013, the same year Daisuki launched, and kept feeding it. Bandai Namco went the other way and bought its way to full control of the smaller thing: 2.1 billion yen in March 2017 for the entirety of Anime Consortium Japan.

That purchase was the end, not a rescue. Premium registrations were closed on 1 July. The shutdown was announced on 1 August. The mobile apps came out of the stores on 2 October, and on 31 October 2017 the streams stopped. Dragon Ball Super was the one exception, carried on until 22 February 2018 because of where its rights sat. The social accounts stayed up until December, posting nothing.

~ what got buried with it ~

Daisuki's real inheritance is negative, and the industry learned it. After this, the Japanese studios mostly stopped trying to own overseas distribution and went back to licensing, and the consolidation ran the other way. Sony bought Crunchyroll in 2021 and folded its own Funimation into it the year after. The distribution layer for anime outside Japan is now more concentrated in one foreign company than it was on the day seven Japanese firms set out to fix precisely that.

The Cool Japan Fund part is the piece worth remembering. A state fund whose job was to make Japanese culture travel put money into a streaming service, and the service was gone in four years while the culture traveled fine without it, through a company that started out as an illegal fansub site. Sometimes the export happens with or without a policy attached to it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »