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One of the many announcements that we heard at Anime Expo (although they actually announced it a few days earlier) outed Neon Alley, a new 24-hour anime video service from Viz Media. At the time all we knew of the service was that it would be debuting on a “major game console,” and will show uncut, English dubbed anime TV episodes and movies, along with some form of original content.
Viz officially launched the service last week on the Sony PlayStation3. The app is a free download; however you need to pay for service for it to be of any use. Neon Alley costs $6.99 per month, which is pretty similar to the other streaming options out there. As far as I can tell there are no “pay X months at a time and get a discount” plans. You do get a one-week free trial when you sign up, so you have a chance to test the service before committing. The service is available only in the USA and Canada.
I haven’t had a lot of time to play with the service, so this isn’t a full review; however I did want to jot down some of my thoughts on the service, to sort of take a first look at it if you will.
[…] A First Look at Neon Alley […]
[…] But CR is by no means the only game in town when it comes to anime consumption in digital form. Of course you can buy and/or rent quite a lot of anime in digital form thanks to iTunes and Amazon. But there are quite a few other sites out there that have streaming anime for the taking. If you’ve got a Netflix membership, well, there you go. They have a fairly respectable collection of anime available in their Instant Streaming service online; and if they don’t have it in digital form, they may have it for rent on DVD or Blu-ray. There’s also Hulu, probably the next well known/popular series besides Netflix, which actually has a pretty decent catalog of anime titles as well. Many anime licensors (FUNimation, etc.) do their own in-house streaming. There’s also 24-hour anime networks such as, well, The Anime Network. And then there’s the new kid on the block, the dark horse (no, not that Dark Horse) in the race, Neon Alley. […]
[…] Neon Alley is Viz’s own service. (Incidentally, a lot has changed at Neon Alley since we looked at it back in 2012. They’ve switched away from the “TV broadcaster” model to the more […]