I understood your point of view. Netflix is better than us now, that's a fact.

I personally don't think Netflix could be exhaustive in every way because the curation work is very important here, to satisfy every segment in the world. Netflix is not in Africa though,

Drama fever, Crunchyroll, viki.com did well in their segment. And we intend to be the best in ours.

I don't know about the others, but the thing that Crunchyroll does differently than Netflix is that it's a lot more like the Steam of Anime. Prior to Crunchyroll, it was extremely common (still is, I think) for fans to simply download fan-subbed versions of content and the license holders wouldn't see any money until they were able to sign a deal with a distribution company that would later sell a series on disc.

Crunchyroll provides the immediacy of fansubs but with legitimacy and sees that license holders get paid something where they weren't getting paid anything.

Additionally, the type of content that Crunchyroll provides isn't necessarily something Netflix would go after, in that it is released on an episode by episode basis (in line with air dates in Japan) rather than all at once (as is the typical Netflix model) and that there is rarely dubbing (which most, though notably not all, Netflix anime has).

That said, Netflix has been seriously expanding their anime efforts. I really do wonder if Crunchyroll is going to be able to keep growing as Netflix expands its presence more and more.

All that said, the one thing I'm really not sure of is how long Netflix can continue to do more and more licensing deals and original content without increasing its subscription cost. In that respect, I think the iTunes model is a lot more stable (and I'm perfectly happy paying for close-to-airtime delivery I get for the shows I do watch through it).

My only gripe with paying for that content is that the price premium seems to be pretty high on iTunes given that the content has revocable DRM (then again, Apple is more likely to be around in this space for a long time than any of the other current players).

In summary: I think you might be right, but it's definitely a pretty dynamic situation. Hope it goes well!

I want to echo the other reply to this post. Crunchyroll offers its customers a way to view the shows as they are released, which was a big change from how anime was normally consumed. Viki works because of the very strong fan subbing community that it has built. From my point of view the best way to compete with Netflix is to find a niche that is hard for them to fill. It's unlikely that Netflix can get people to sub their shows for free. Netflix wasn't designed with the queue type setup that crunchy roll has, etc.