Good summary. I actually did not know about CR's grey-market roots. That kicked off real users who competed on getting the highest quality subtitle job

Good summary. I actually did not know about CR's grey-market roots. That kicked off real users who competed on getting the highest quality subtitle jobs uploaded quickest after the first broadcast of a given show in Japan. This has definitely been a thing since before CR! Before CR "went legit" the non-Japan market for anime was severely underserved. You could download illegal fansubs for free, often within 24 hours of its broadcast in Japan. Or... you could pay major $$$ for official US releases years later. And a lot of series were never released here at all. * VHS/DVD/BluRay sales clearly indicated that plenty of folks wanted to pay for this stuff. * Fansub torrent stats clearly indicated that plenty of folks wanted this stuff sooner than the industry was giving it to them. And yet, somehow, it took about 15 years for the industry to bridge this gap. As somebody on the fringes of the industry, it made me want to scream. It didn't exactly take a major leap of cosmic brainpower to realize that while not all fansub-downloaders would pay for this stuff, this was the hardcore segment of the fanbase and certainly some of them would.