The war for
the otaku streaming monopoly is getting intense. During a
presentation in London, Gaurav Gandhi, vice president of Amazon
Prime Video for the Asia-Pacific region, made a rather bold statement:
they want their platform to become the number one global destination for
consuming anime. They're basically telling Crunchyroll and Netflix that they're
going for their slice of the pie.
Big
promises, questionable track record
To show
that they have their wallets ready, during the event they confirmed that they
will add cult gems such as The Ghost in the Shell and Hokuto
no Ken (The Fist of the North Star) to their catalog, in addition to
the second season of From Old Country Bumpkin to Master Swordsman.
Gandhi boasted that since they are already the "home of the best anime in
Japan," the next logical step is to dominate the rest of the world.
Veteran fans have a good memory, though, and many remember 2017's
disastrous Anime Strike, an additional pay channel in the U.S. that
failed miserably and had to shut down the following year.
The
Elephant in the Room: AI Dubbing
Amazon's
real obstacle is not buying licenses, but treating the medium with the respect
that the community demands. The corporate discourse of being the
"preferred destination" clashes head-on with its recent attempts to
lower costs. At the end of last year, the platform was harshly criticized when
users discovered that they were using Artificial Intelligence to
generate dubs in English and Latin Spanish under the label of
"AI beta".
Series such
as Banana Fish, No Game No Life Zero and
even Vinland Saga suffered this nefarious experiment. The
backlash on social media was so overwhelming that Amazon had to
backtrack, quietly removing all of these synthetic dubs in
early December 2025. It's clear that if Prime Video really wants to gain the
trust of global audiences, it will have to invest in real voice actors and
quality locations, rather than looking for technological shortcuts.
