Today, the anime community collectively said, “It’s about damn time!”

The big news:

The North American anime distributor Viz Media has announced that it will begin streaming the latest episodes of the Naruto Shippūden anime sequel within a week of their Japanese broadcast premiere — for free — on January 15. The next latest episode will be added every Thursday thereafter.

In addition, the official Naruto.com website will stream the first eight episodes of Naruto Shippūden for free on January 2. The website will add eight more episodes every Friday thereafter until all of the earlier episodes are online. Naruto.com is already streaming the episodes of the first Naruto ninja action series, and its ad-supported streams are available to users in the United States and Canada.

This was a necessary move for the anime companies to work on curbing the problem of fansubbing. Everybody in the biz with a clue, knew this had to happen. It still remains to be seen how well this will be executed, but it’s a big step towards eliminating the need for fansubs.

Read all the news at Anime News Network

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