Crunchyroll Has Rough Weekend With Late Episode Debuts, Missing English Language Subs

Disappointed Crunchyroll subscribers flocked to social media, with one user claiming that several other series had also missed their scheduled times, like Let This Grieving Soul Retire, while others were only available on the web and not via the app, such as A Wild Last Boss Appeared. Many users reported that English language subtitles weren’t uploaded properly, either; when My Hero Academia went up several hours late, it didn’t initially have English subtitles. Oddly enough, many of the series that missed their debut times on Crunchyroll’s app and website went up at the correct times on Crunchyroll’s Prime Video channel.

While it seems that most of these technical issues with the Saturday slate were largely fixed by the next day or so, to many Crunchyroll users, these problems marked further evidence of the service going downhill in recent months. As one frustrated user on Reddit put it, “Some episodes that aired 10+ hours ago, are still just not even up. How can this company actively be getting so much worse at doing the basic things that they had been doing just fine for years. Truly insane.” This isn’t the first time Crunchyroll has run into these kinds of issues in recent months, as the same problem with episodes airing late occurred this summer. Beyond this, the platform also recently had a snafu when AI-generated subtitles were found on the service; the company claimed that these were provided by a third-party vendor and that using AI was in breach of their contract.

Beyond this, Crunchyroll has recently been subject to criticism following alleged changes to its subtitle technology, as reported on by Anime By The Numbers. To summarize, Crunchyroll previously used a typsetting format for its internally created subtitles, which allowed them to have multiple subtitles on-screen at once, among other things. This was a big deal because if a given scene had multiple speakers or featured written text that needed to be translated (like a text message), the previous typsetting format allowed several rows of subtitles to be placed at various heights on the screen. By comparison, none of the newly debuted shows on the service at the time Anime By The Number published its article demonstrated this capability, only ever featuring a maximum of two lines of subtitles on screen at once, leaving in-world text untranslated and cutting off speakers. Considering that this more robust subtitle typesetting was something that previously set Crunchyroll apart from its competitors, like Netflix and Hulu, which have never used this technology, the seeming loss of this functionality is a significant blow.

Sony acquired Crunchyroll back in 2021, merging their own competing service, Funimation, with the anime streamer. At the time, many were worried that this consolidation could lead to monopolistic practices and the decline of the service, as it arguably no longer had a major direct competitor. Sony didn’t do much to assuage these concerns when it raised prices on Crunchyroll last year, and then made mass layoffs a few months ago. We’ve reached out to Crunchyroll for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.