In a recent interview in the The Verge magazine’s Decoder podcast on Monday, it was revealed by Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini that the company is currently testing the use of gernerative artificial intelligence (A.I.) on its close captioning and subtitling.
The reason for this test was to “optimize their processes” and to release subtitles in more languages closest to the Japanese airtime dates. Aside from this, it is also testing generative A.I. to personalizing and assisting in user experience in discovering titles, and in different company workflows in general.
In October 2023, Crunchyroll released poor-quality subtitles for episode 1 of The Yuzuki Family’s Four Sons. After numerous complaints of its users and on social media, the episode was immediately removed and reuploaded with proper subtitles after a week. They explained that they were “working with the licensor of the series” for the updated subtitles.
On August 9, 2021. The Funimation Global Group (owned by Sony) had completed its acquisition of Crunchyroll from AT&T. It first announced its acquisition in December 2020 with a purchase price of $1.175 billion USD. The home video releases of Crunchyroll were also now listed under Crunchyroll.
About Crunchyroll
Crunchyroll was founded in May 14, 2006 by Kun Gao, James Lin, Brandon Ooi, and Vu Nguyen. It was originally a for-profit video upload and streaming site that specialized in hosting East Asian content. Some of these contents hosted by the platform were subtitled by fans (fansubs.)
It then secured a capital investment of $4.05 million USD from the venture capital film Venrock in 2008, which criticism from anime licensors and distributors like Funimation and Bandai Entertainment as the site was still allowing uploads of unlicensed copies of copyrighted titles. It finally secured legal distribution agreement in with companies such as Gonzo for various titles. In 2009, the company announced a deal with TV Tokyo to stream episodes of Naruto Shippuden and committed to remove all illegal uploaded content off its websites.
As years went forward, the company branched out from streaming anime to distributing DVD home video, and manga.
Source: The Verge Decoder podcast
