[Daiz]

I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.

[transcriptase]

What possible incentive could they have for doing this?

[virtue3]

I worked at crunchyroll.

Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream.

This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files.

It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to support streaming bandwith. So you also get a #hardSubLanguages * #videoQualities

[jonhohle]

What reason would there be for removing old, loved subtitles? Licensing fees?

[Daiz]

Crunchyroll is currently using a subtitle rendering stack that is highly unique in the media industry, being based on the Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitle format. It seems that the current executives would like to replace this unique stack with something more "industry standard" (and far less capable), but they can't do that as long as their back catalog is full of ASS subtitles - if they just switched stacks without doing anything else, all of these back catalog subtitles would just stop working completely. Which is why in order to perform such a stack switch, all old subtitles would need to be replaced with worse ones to make them compatible with the less capable new stack.

[Crespyl]

IIUC, it comes down to simplifying playback/subtitle rendering to the lowest common denominator among the various western streaming platforms.

The good/old subtitles in the ASS format required a more complex playback system than what Netflix/Hulu (and maybe blueray players) currently offer. This could be worked around by burning the subs into the video stream, but then you need to keep separate copies of your (large) video files for each subtitled language.

That doesn't seem like it'd be such a huge problem to me, but what do I know?

The post does a good job explaining the effective monopoly system at play that prevents real competition to provide any pressure to improve or maintain the prior quality.

[dylan604]

Lots of old CR content was fan subs which may or may not have followed any kind of "best practices". It was also a reason that CR struggled with legitimacy with the studios in the early days. They tried to remove content once a US company licensed a show as way to show they weren't pirates, but the friction was always there.

[underlipton]

Without knowing for sure, a conceivable strategy would be making it so that users who don't know that "good subs" can exist more readily accept "bad subs" as the standard. Same playbook as Google lobotomizing search and the index that search can access because that traditional search product is more efficacious than Gemini, which Google is trying to push on users.