Of all the anti-piracy wars, I feel like this one is probably the most viscerally futile. Anime may have become substantially more mainstream than it was in the past, but it just has a huge culture around piracy and fansubs that is not going to be easy to shake; this is especially true as the main legal venues for anime consolidate and target primarily mainstream audiences, leaving a lot of the older fans disillusioned with purchasing anime goods outside of direct imports from Japan.
I am not a huge anime watcher, but it's hard to think of a fan base more obsessed with cleaner rips, better encoding, etc. and a ton of people in the scene are simply not motivated by the prospect of making money.
I sincerely do not believe you can turn a substantial amount of the people pirating anime into e.g. Crunchyroll subscribers. I'll believe it when I see it.
(Of course, mentioning Crunchyroll is, in itself, kind of funny: owing to just how rooted the modern foreign anime fan scene is rooted in piracy, it began as a website for pirating anime.)
I am not a huge anime watcher, but it's hard to think of a fan base more obsessed with cleaner rips, better encoding, etc. and a ton of people in the scene are simply not motivated by the prospect of making money.
I sincerely do not believe you can turn a substantial amount of the people pirating anime into e.g. Crunchyroll subscribers. I'll believe it when I see it.
(Of course, mentioning Crunchyroll is, in itself, kind of funny: owing to just how rooted the modern foreign anime fan scene is rooted in piracy, it began as a website for pirating anime.)