Streaming Services Are Ticking Me Off

I've written about Haikyuu!! on this blog a little bit. It's a sports anime about volleyball. I had heard of it from "buzz" online (by people who are undoubtedly much, much younger than me), and when I saw that the first two seasons of it were on Netflix, I decided to give it a chance. I wasn't expecting to get so into. I figured that I would watch the first few episodes and think "eh, it's not for me," and forget about it. Obviously that didn't happen, so when I reached the end of season two, I had to figure out where to watch season three.

I read that season three was available on a streaming service I had heard of called "Crunchyroll," which specializes in anime. So I signed up for the free trial. When I found Haikyuu!! and started the first episode of the third season, I was perturbed to see subtitles, and no option to watch it in English. I don't want to get into dub vs. sub here, but since I had watched the first two seasons in English, I had gotten used to the English voice actors and wanted to continue it that way. I knew the third season had been dubbed... so who had it?

Enter the third streaming service: HiDive. They had season three in the English dub and thankfully their free trial lasted a month. So I enjoyed the third season there. Now onto the fourth, which I had come to accept has not yet been dubbed. So, back to Crunchyroll to watch season four.

I managed to re-watch the first three seasons once more before my Hi-Dive trial ended, but now that's over and all I have left is Netflix. I couldn't watch the fourth season again, since my Crunchyroll trial was only two weeks. Since I enjoyed watching the show twice, I had the feeling that I would want to own Haikyuu!!, so I wouldn't have to worry about it being removed from Netflix or having to re-subscribe to a million different streaming services. I checked Amazon Prime Video to see if it was available for purchase there. And it was. But only the sub. And only the first two seasons. Nowhere that I could find was it possible to own it digitally. Amazon didn't even have physical Blu-rays. Eventually, I found the first three seasons on a website called Sentai for a reasonable price, and I ordered them. (I'll hold off on the fourth season until it gets dubbed, which I hope happens soon).

At this point I've lost count of how many different websites I have consulted to try to watch and own a single show. This is infuriating, and is kind of par for the course when it comes to streaming services. If you get in the mood to watch a movie, it doesn't matter how many streaming services you have access to, you won't find it. Streaming services only ever provide movies you don't want to watch or have already seen a million times. TV shows are a little better, but only marginally so. I'm tired. I'm so tired. It makes me miss the days of cable and owning DVDs. Instead, you pay four different companies to not provide the content you're looking for.