David Cabrera
March 5, 2013 
After a few years of largely uncontested reign over (legal) anime streaming sites, Crunchyroll now faces competition from the Japanese themselves.
The new streaming site Daisuki! is a collaboration of heavy hitters like Aniplex, Toei, TMS, and Sunrise, along with quite a few production and ad companies. All of these groups have some works on Crunchyroll, but there are noticeable absences in CR’s catalog like Psycho-Pass (Aniplex) and Tiger and Bunny (Sunrise), which are on Hulu.
Sunrise’s involvement is especially interesting here: the entire Gundam franchise is rapidly going out of print on video, and it coincidentally has disappeared from all online streaming very recently. Will folks have to go to Daisuki for Gundam, for example? All this remains to be seen.
However, Daisuki is promising Gundam, along with Madoka Magica (on CR), Prince of Tennis (most recent series on CR), Lupin III (only the recent Fujiko Mine side series is streaming), and One Piece (streamed by Funimation and Toei).
So what does anime streaming look like in a year? Will some titles be on a shelf labeled “Crunchyroll” and other titles be on a shelf labeled “Daisuki”? What will the overlap look like? Will Daisuki even offer a service competitive with CR’s easy 1080p streams? Unfortunately, it’s too early in the game to know anything other than “this exists”… but don’t let that stop you from speculating!
Sources:
Daisuki.net
ANN
This story originally ran in the 3/5/13 issue of the Otaku USA e-News email newsletter. If you’re not on the mailing list, then you’re reading it late! Click here to join.
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