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I want to watch anime more regularly but I'm not sure where to go to do so. Do you have any recommendations?
My 2 main dealbreakers are significant amounts of paid content or the service itself being paid (because I'm not of working age) and that it doesn't work in mobile. So any reccomendations or anything more you might want to say?
I used to use 9anime.to to watch stuff. I just checked to see if it works on my phone (Oneplus 6t), and it does.
Not to condone piracy, but if you're too broke to pay you don't really qualify as "lost revenue" either.
As a formerly-too-broke-to-pay-for-stuff student, I do wish supporting media was decoupled from access in some clever distribution model. I'd never have found half the stuff I went back to support otherwise.
Yeah. I favor paying for stuff in a fair model or sucking it up and watching ads. I went straight to piracy because when you're young and broke, arguably developing the interest is of greater benefit to a franchise than struggling to pay or losing interest from extensive ads.
It might also depend on on your country/region, but Crunchyroll and Funimation have legal anime streaming sites, free with ads (or a paid subscription). Hulu also has some animation - though I'm not sure their current business model. Netflix has a number of shows, but obviously that falls under being paid content. I think Adult Swim has a number of anime shows as well, though I don't know how well they work on mobile.
If you do decide to sail the high seas, I would advise against going to random websites laden with ads. Those don't support the creators at all, but they do pay the website owners and encourage more bad actors to put up sites. The preferred way would be to safely (with a VPN) download/torrent fansubs. And of course, when you are able to - support the creators by buying things.
A warning about the free version of Crunchyroll: I'm told that there are too many ads. Like, an ad comes up every few mins of anime content. I have a paid subscription to Crunchyroll, but I have a job (in contrast with OP). I don't think I could deal with that many ads. I guess OP can try, and see.
I also pirate all my anime.
subsplease are a group that rip crunchyroll releases asap (unsure if I can link to them)
They provide magnet links and torrent files for each release
From there, you can use a torrent app. On android, I believe I used Flud. Windows has Deluge. On linux I use transmission. Can't provide any info for mac/ios.
Finally, you just need to play it, and VLC player works fine for that on android/windows. Linux has mpv.
Pirating does take up space fairly quickly, especially at higher qualities (1080p episodes currently hover around 1.4GB each, before any groups re-encode them for smaller file sizes), so make sure to have the space, or to remove videos once you're done watching.
I personally pirate anime through torrents (though I'm planning on paying for it in the future, I want to support the industry), so I would recommend that, but if you want streaming sites...
I hear 9anime.to is pretty good.