Considering the wild popularity of hentai anime, you’d think that some company would have found a way to become the “Netflix for hentai,” making all that amazing ecchi anime available to fans. But no one has. In this post, let’s look at five reasons why making one “legal hentai streaming site to rule them all” would face an uphill battle.
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Why Isn’t There a ‘Netflix for Hentai’
Along with the explosion of anime around the world, hentai anime has become immensely popular. In every era, it seems there’s a hentai so infamous that everyone below the age of 30 has seen it. Hentai series like Bible Black, Oni Chichi, Overflow, and Euphoria are so famous that even your normie friends have probably seen them.
With such a cultural footprint, the hentai anime industry must be adapting to the modern streaming age we live in. So can’t it profit and grow along with anime? Sadly, that’s not really happening. A lot of great 18+ anime titles are getting created, and J-List has lots of them in stock for you. But despite the popularity of animated ecchi content around the world, there’s very little licensed hentai anime out there these days.
This wasn’t always the case. Before the bursting of the anime licensing bubble in 2006, which took out anime retailers like Musicland and Suncoast Video and caused Newtype USA to fold (sob!), there were several licensors bringing out hentai titles. Companies like Media Blasters, Central Park Media, and Right Stuf’s Critical Mass Video branch brought out 18+ anime titles, and it was a great time for fans who loved watching uncensored hentai on DVD.
As the industry changed, allowing fans to watch ecchi anime on streaming sites, the world of licensed hentai anime slowly faded away. Unlike mainstream anime, no major streaming site emerged to bring hentai anime to fans.
5 Reasons Why a Legal Hentai Streaming Service is Hard to Run
There are many reasons why Japan’s naughty anime isn’t flourishing as well as it could be with international fans. These reasons explain why any company trying to make a broad platform where fans can watch all the hentai they want, while supporting hentai creators, will likely encounter problems.
High Piracy Rate by Fans Killed Hentai DVD Licensing
I want to be nuanced about this topic. On the one hand, the high piracy rate of anime hentai by fans was certainly the main factor in the disappearance of licensed hentai anime DVDs around 2008. As file sharing and video streaming took off on the Internet, finding that hentai series you like online became easy. Watching hentai on shady streaming sites proved impossible for most fans to resist.
I know the issue of “piracy” is complicated. When Love Hina creator Ken Akamatsu was interviewed by Japanese lawmakers about the challenges of online piracy of manga, I asked J-List customers why they read manga on unlicensed websites despite being dedicated manga fans, and got some interesting responses.
Issues included the inability to resist the convenience of instantly accessible manga chapters on their phone. An unwillingness to wait weeks or months for a proper version to come out. Licensed manga series get cancelled before the entire run is complete. And that manga might get licensed for major markets like English, but what about countries like Spain or Switzerland with multiple official languages?
The funny thing is that, while fans of the era often wouldn’t think twice about grabbing their favorit hentai anime through not-so-legal means, visual novel players were much more likely to properly by the games we released through JAST USA. Sure, there was piracy, but it seemed like many customers became such fans ero the eroge genre, they usually started buying the titles from us before long.
Ecchi Content Isn’t Streaming-Friendly
There’s a reason why most of the studios that made your favorite ecchi titles are out of business by now: the switch to streaming means sexy anime is often left out in the cold. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ might be happy adding mainstream shounen series to their back catalogs, but they’re not likely to show the complete uncensored run of To Love-ru or Shinmai Maou no Testament.
And yet, while some beloved studios like Arms, Xebec, and Studio Fantasia are no longer with us, anime companies that enjoy making sexy content for fans still exist. Somehow, every anime season always contains two or three sexy offerings, making sure fans have some fan service to enjoy, like Yandere Elf or Please Put Them On, Takamine-san.
Another Netflix of Anime Challenge: Hentai Anime Studios Are Risk-Averse Dinosaurs
All Japanese companies are conservative. They never want to change their business model until they have no choice. When the domestic Japanese economy fell into a new recession during the two “lost decades” after the bursting of the Japanese asset bubble, I was secretly glad. At least it meant that Japanese companies had to change theirs thinking, perhaps overcome their fear of selling visual novels or other products in the West. The issues in the local Japanese economy opened a lot of doors for J-List and JAST USA.
Hentai anime companies seem particularly unwilling to adapt to new situations. Because they’ve got enough customers who will buy their current DVD offerings, they don’t feel the need to take chances to find a way to bring their products to a wider audience outside of Japan.
Payment Processors Would Hate the Netflix of Hentai
Of course, all businesses carrying sexy products need to worry about whether their payment processors will take issue with the products they’re selling. A major legal hentai streaming site would run into all kinds of issues.
(Actually, this feels like an opportunity for JCB. JCB is the largest Japan-based credit card company. If they opened up to an international audience, they could offer prepaid JCB cards, with customers preloading money onto their cards. Customers could then use these cards to make purchases from Japanese websites like DLSite, DMM, and Fanza.)
Streaming Is a Terrible Business Model (Unless You’re Netflix)
Finally, there’s the reality that streaming is a terrible business. Unless you happen to be named Netflix. The high costs of running the servers, the lack of scalability, and the difficulty of working with Japanese hentai publishers would make a major legal hentai streaming site tricky to keep afloat.
Happily, J-List Has All the Hentai Anime You Need!
The good news is that J-List is loaded with awesome ecchi anime for you. We have all the classics in stock and release new works every week. Browse all our amazing stock. If we don’t have the title you want, you can request any title through Megumi Express, our new proxy buying service!
Thanks for checking out this post about the challenges of running a legal hentai streaming site. We probably won’t see a “Netflix of Hentai” launch anytime soon. What do you think about this subject? Tell us in the comments below!
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