FUNimation: Never Leave Home Without It?
As was announced Expo (not that many noticed, in the wake of the Geneon and ADV deals), FUNimation has launched its mobile anime initiative over at JumpInMobile.TV (note that it’s a page for mobile phones, so it looks ugly in a desktop browser).
The service lets you download an entire season of one of the available shows (Gunslinger Girl, Moon Phase, and Galaxy Railways– although if I remember correctly, Galaxy Railways comes free when you buy one of the other two shows) for $4.99. But instead of coming to you in individual episodes, you watch the episodes in 5-minute chunks.
I’d love to poke around and review the service more for you, especially since I’m wondering if 5-minute chunks will work– let’s round down episode times to 20 minutes, times 13 episodes is 260 minutes, divided by 5 is 52…it just seems like if you want to watch a significant chunk of the series on, say, a lengthy car ride, it might be a nuisance to have to do it like that. Though on the other hand, downloads on phones tend to be slow, so it’s probably better to break it up into chunks. Hm…oh, also, I assume it’s dub, because watching subs on a cell phone sounds rough.
Anyway! As I was saying, I’d love to give it a shot myself, but this service is only for Sprint and AT&T users, and I have Verizon (♥). If any of you try it, let me know how it goes!
Tags: digidistro, FUNimation, mobile
July 9th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Well there goes me using it (Verizon too).
July 9th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Woops I have T-mobile! better luck next time Funnimation! :roll:
July 9th, 2008 at 8:19 am
My first thought wonders what the battery life would be like downloading and then watching these shows.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I’m giving the service a test run on my recently purchased Samsung Instinct, and so far it’s not bad. The reason the episodes are split into chunks is due to the concern for battery life and constant streaming being a big drain on the battery, even though the Instinct comes with two batteries as standard equipment.
As far as actual download speed, it works best over PowerVision service (EVDO/Rev. A) with Rev A. being best suited to quick downloads (less than 90 seconds for 5 minutes of content).
The episodes are encoded in H.264 Baseline Level 1 @ 64K with a resolution of 320×240 and AAC audio @ 24K.
The idea is novel, but they may be better off in turning this into an over the air download service instead of streaming split parts similar to the former mobile implementation of The Anime Network which no longer exists.
July 9th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
AT&T with a blackberry perl. So far my phone is not supported with service. Will try again when I purchase an iphone in a few days.