The project offers a wide variety of challenges, and it will be interesting to see if Funimation is up to the task. On the technical end, they\u2019re essentially asking people to flood their servers at 8:00 PM every Wednesday. That\u2019s potentially an awful lot of simultaneous traffic to deal with, and I\u2019m already having apocalyptic visions of compromised video quality and endless periods of buffering. The only reliable way of testing something like that is to just do it, and I suspect that there will be some very nervous IT people a few days from now.<\/p>\n The live discussion show takes those technical hurdles and adds an extra variable in the form of fan interaction. Some poor soul is going to have to sift through a live feed of comments ranging from \u201cDIS IS MY FAVORITE SHOW EVAR\u201d to \u201cU GUYS SUCK\u201d in search of coherent questions to feed the hosts. Heaven help them if they\u2019re planning to make that discussion stream visible to everyone, as they\u2019ll also have to deal with fans arguing in real time. Massive server traffic is hard to simulate, but there\u2019s absolutely no preparing for human interaction. Maybe everyone will be calm and civil, but Internet history suggests that\u2019s kind of a long shot. Best of luck, forum moderators.<\/p>\n Even if all of that goes well, there\u2019s still the small matter of dubbing ten shows on a fixed schedule. Even for one of the major players in the US anime industry, that\u2019s a tall order. Spacing the launch dates out over the next month should help a bit, but the pressure will still be on. Under normal circumstances, it\u2019s tough to get \u201con time,\u201d \u201cunder budget,\u201d and \u201cworth watching\u201d together as a packaged deal. Tokyo Ghoul <\/em>also presents the added challenge of dubbing the second season of a series before the first. Maintaining consistent writing and acting quality is hard enough when you\u2019re up against a deadline, and adding a full season of backstory probably won\u2019t make it any easier. If they\u2019ve been working on this since day one, at least they\u2019ve got a six-week head start.<\/p>\n If (and that\u2019s a very big IF) Funimation can stay on top of all these moving parts, the broadcast dub program has the potential to be a big deal. It could give anime something resembling a primetime TV block, bring dub fans into the simulcast loop, and present a more compelling case for Funimation\u2019s streaming subscriptions. Even with last season\u2019s trial run, it\u2019s still a very ambitious move. Time will tell if it works, but it\u2019s at least intriguing enough to lure me into watching this Wednesday.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This Week in Anime\u00a0is hastily cobbled together by Paul Jensen. You can follow his ramblings about anime and manga on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>. Check back every Monday for new articles.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are plenty of things to like about streaming anime. A few bucks a month gets you more content than the average human could possibly watch, available in HD whenever and wherever you want. One of the few things that the simulcast scene has been missing is a sense of occasion. New episodes tend to [Read more…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1689"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1691,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions\/1691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"DubbleTalk\"](\"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/DubbleTalk.jpg\")
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