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Something to Stream: My Hero Academia Launch Party

The My Hero Academia launch party will be streaming live online over at Funimation beginning at 1AM Eastern Time this Sunday, April 3rd. Usually when a new show launches they just play the first episode an hour or half a day after it airs in Tokyo. This time, there will be live pre-show and post-show programming, complete with a chat/IM interface allowing you to talk to the hosts and guests. They will be throwing in some giveaways, although they are vague about what that entails.

Of course, you need to subscribe to their service to get access, but you can use their 2 week free trial to check it out (along with everything else they offer), and then cancel before the regular payments start if you didn’t find anything you were interested in.

I haven’t previously seen Funimation do anything like this to launch a new series, if it works out for them perhaps we will get more of these kind of events. If they put the time and effort in to do it right, it could be an excellent Value Added feature of their subscription service, becoming worthwhile for their business model and their subscriber’s entertainment both. I look forward to seeing how they do on this one, and am keeping my fingers crossed.

Something to Stream: Dimension W

By 2071, the world’s energy problems are seemingly solved by a network of cross-dimensional power induction coils, but there is one minor problem. What the power can do depends on which of the multiverse iterations it was drawn from, and if it isn’t pulled from the officially sanctioned universe it might be able to overwhelm the energies employed by by the government and the police. Needless to say, they have a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t happen, so they pay a premium bounty to anyone who collects the bootleg coils for them, under the excuse that “illegal coils are dangerous”. Which is true; they just don’t mention dangerous to whom.

In this setting, coil-hating repo man Kyoma makes most of his money from confiscating such power sources and selling them to the government. The unique coil android Mira (who is more than she seems) is near him when she sees her father die at the hands of that government, in an event which also takes out 20 square blocks of the city, knocking out herself and any others within a 50 mile radius who’s lives depend on constant coil input. The two end up having to work together to try to achieve their separate goals.

There have only been two episodes at this point, with episode 3 becoming available at 9AM tomorrow, Saturday the 23rd. That is about an hour after it airs in Tokyo, and the built in leeway in the time frame is because they will still have to subtitle it into English, which might take them more than an hour. I do like the two episodes I have seen so far, and am quite looking forward to more.

Something to Stream: RWBY, TV

I watch near-realtime streaming TV shows from Hulu+/Amazon or Cable/Show/Network Apps because being tied to the TV Show clock is so 20th century. To begin I have to mention that RWBY kicked off its new season the other week, filling in lots of the missing backstory pieces explaining how everything got to be like this as well as advancing the current plot line to new levels of tension. This is my favorite animation created in Poser, it is quite nicely realized. It is also streamed from one of my two Asian near-realtime services, those being Crunchyroll and Funimation. They want to simulcast them within an hour or so of their Tokyo/Seoul/Hong Kong air time, but they face the added challenge of getting each episode subbed into English before they can post it online. Sometimes that makes the presentation a few hours late.

But next week we get a number of Broadcast TV shows I have been waiting for eagerly, so it is appropriate I mention them in this post since I will not be watching them as the shows air. In most instances, Broadcast TV shows are available to watch starting at local midnight after their transmission, just like the cable companies VOD presentations (and under pretty much the same distribution contract), and I usually go on a binge the following weekend. I might not be able to wait this week though.

Tuesday brings the long awaited Season 2 premier of Agent Carter, which is pretty much my favorite Marvel franchise. If you missed season 1, you can watch the whole thing for free on their site to get you caught up for Season 2, but you only have a few days to do so. The other stand alone show I have been waiting for is Heroes Reborn, but this time it is the season finale rather than the start of anything; that happens Thursday. And yes, you can watch the entire season of that online for free to get you ready to see how the season closes.

Tuesday also brings the Winter Premier (the 2nd half of the season) of The Flash, kicking off the next round of CW DC Universe stories. That is followed the next day by Arrow, and I expect both of them to be crossover stories gearing us up for Thursday’s Series Premier of Legends of Tomorrow. I am looking forward to this up-leveling of the DC Universe presentation, which finally puts them within range of Marvel’s TV offerings. Somehow, I just haven’t found the excitement in Supergirl, which needs to step up to the plate to be on a par with the rest of the shows.

It doesn’t quite end there. Also this week, on Wednesday Supernatural kicks off the second half of the season, and The 100 adds its own flavor to Thursdays. And finally, next Sunday we get the long awaited rebirth of The X-Files, bringing a true classic back to television. All in all, it promises to be one hell of a season!

Something to Stream: Winter 2016, Gate Season 2 and more!

Welcome to the Winter 2016 Anime season where we finally get Gate Season 2 and a ton of other shows! Schwarzes Marken is the new season of the BETA invasion of Earth battles, this time featuring the 1983 East German Army. Once more the human forces are so busy trying to gain an advantage over each other that they are ordered to let other humans die rather than combine against their true enemies (one the alien invaders, the other the commanding officers who issue those orders). Erased has a manga artist protagonist who is forced to repeat the past moment which last threatened his life until he gets it right and survives it. Durarara X2 The Third Arc is also about to start, along with Lupin The 3rd Part 4, both series that don’t really need an introduction from me. Those are just the shows that caught my attention right out of the box, there are a number of others that I need to look into before reporting them here.

Something to Stream: Noragami

Noragami means something like Stray God in English, and the slacker stray god at the heart of this story doesn’t have a clue how to grow his worshiper base. Yato is a minor god without a single shrine and with no divine weapon, but he wants to make it big. Then he meets a girl named Hiyori who changes everything in and about his world. I like the music and the animation style in this one, and look forward to seeing many more episodes; hope those episodes get created!

Childhood’s End Trailer

The revolutionary 1953 Arthur C. Clarke novel Childhood’s End will be hitting the small screen as a 3 episode miniseries. The first episode airs beginning on December 14th on Syfy, just before the premier of The Expanse, or you can stream it now from their web site. The peaceful alien invasion of Earth is followed by decades of apparent utopia under their rule, but most people fail to notice their goal is to change humanity forever.