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.