If an R1 licensee refused to release the last 3 episodes of a series, they would get a large amount of complaints, wouldn't they?

[Dracula on a bike]

For example, suppose that Viz had released only the first 34 episodes of Death Note on DVD, despite all 37 of them having been shown on Adult Swim. How would the audience have reacted to that?

Well, guess what: Crunchyroll has only episodes 1 through 46 of Futari wa Pretty Cure available for download-to-own, while they have all 49 of them available for streaming. I sent a message to them about this:

Are the last 3 episodes of Pretty Cure supposed to be available for download-to-own? So far, I've purchased episodes 1 through 46 of Pretty Cure. However, when I try to load these URLs:

http://www.crunchyroll.com/showproduct?sku=cr-toei-prettycure-47

http://www.crunchyroll.com/showproduct?sku=cr-toei-prettycure-48

http://www.crunchyroll.com/showproduct?sku=cr-toei-prettycure-49

the website responds with an error message: "Item not found." (This has not happened for episodes 1 through 46, but only for 47 through 49.)

Is the reason that these 3 episodes are unavailable for download-to-own because a mistake was made? Or, are they intentionally unavailable?

If they are supposed to be available (but are unavailable due to a mistake), would you please fix the problem so that I can purchase these before the download service is discontinued on March 31st? Thanks.

(Incidentally, the index page for the downloadable episodes http://www.crunchyroll.com/library/Pretty_Cure/products has some errors. Each episode in the range 1 through 20 is listed twice, and episodes from 31 onwards are not listed at all.)


That was 9 days ago. They haven't responded at all. And, in just 8 days from now, they're going to get rid of all of their downloadable episodes.

Nice, eh?

[something]

I'm not even sure what PreCure is doing on CR - the quality is absolutely terrible in every respect (unwatchable really) and they never made much of a big deal of it being there. That said, if they don't have the last eps it's either because they didn't have rights for some reason and can't, or because as they've announced, DTO is going away site-wide. I doubt they'll add content now to a disappearing service.

It is odd that they'd be missing three episodes, yes, but I think it'd be a lot odder if it were just about any other title on the site.

[LKK]

CR announced that they were discontinuing the download-to-own service altogether. Perhaps that has something to do with not having those last 3 episodes available?

[Ashyukun]

CR announced that they were discontinuing the download-to-own service altogether. Perhaps that has something to do with not having those last 3 episodes available?
Though I only have access via the CR app for my iPhone at the moment, the episodes are available for streaming, so it would not surprise me if this were the case. It's also impossible to know just what the arrangements were that were behind the DTO setup so they may have been restricted in when they could release certain episodes and ended up discontinuing the downloads before the last ones were supposed to be available. I'd imagine when they made the decision to drop the DTO they stopped worrying about setting up new pages/encodes, so it's possible they just hadn't gotten to those and decided not to put the resources into finishing it up.

I'm kind of curious exactly what the numbers were for how many people actually were still using the DTO service... I know I stopped using it when they shifted to the montly subscription model for the streaming and their streams actually became (IMO) watchable, which would have been at the beginning of the second season of Linebarrels.

[Fencedude]

That was 9 days ago. They haven't responded at all. And, in just 8 days from now, they're going to get rid of all of their downloadable episodes.

Nice, eh?

One wonders why you would want to pay to download those absolutely horrible Precure files.

[Dracula on a bike]

One wonders why you would want to pay to download those absolutely horrible Precure files.

Not everyone has such high standards. I've seen DVDs with worse video quality; for example, CPM's release of the Project A-ko OVAs.

(Well, except for episodes episodes 21 through 36; on these, it appears they used only "weave" deinterlacing prior to encoding, which when combined with a maximum bitrate limit just ruined the quality. The rest weren't so bad as that.)

Also, consider that the streams are going to go away eventually. I'd like to have a copy which I can keep indefinitely.

Also, the streams require Flash Player, which I absolutely detest, for several reasons.

Finally, DRM-free download-to-own is the method for distributing video media which I would prefer over all others. I don't have a very high-throughput connection to the Internet; even with the 480p streams from Hulu, I need to pause the video at the beginning and wait for the buffer to fill, and then about halfway through the episode the buffer becomes empty and I need to once again wait for it to fill. So, for higher resolutions, downloads are basically my only option. I wanted to support the only legal DRM-free download-to-own service that there was (even if the video/audio quality on the particular series I wanted to watch from there was much worse than it could have been), and I'm disappointed to see it go away.