Anitube used to be one of the best known website to watch anime online in Portuguese. At the peak of its popularity in 2014, the portal achieved more than 50,000 simultaneous logins. However, it shut down in 2016 after being embroiled in controversy for offering illegal services, broadcasting Japanese animations such as Naruto, One Piece and Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan), without paying royalties to the original producers.
Nowadays, there are several Anitube clones that are still in operation, but all of them are still considered pirate sites. Despite the controversy, the portal has played an important role in popularizing anime in Brazil and even in the emergence of official streaming services, such as Crunchyroll.
When was Anitube created?
Anitube’s exact debut date is unknown, but the site had been operating since before 2010. At that time, there was still no Crunchyroll, Netflix, or Amazon Prime Video to officially watch anime. That is why the portal was so successful in the Tupiniquin lands.
With a library full of classic and recent anime, the portal has made full episodes available for free, without having to download them. Often new chapters were released with Portuguese subtitles the same day they aired in Japan.
Anitube was more famous in Japan than in Brazil
Despite being quite famous in Brazil, Anitube’s largest audience was in Japan. According to reports from the Japanese government, 93.5% of accesses came from the Asian country, while only 4% came from Brazil.
This fact has led the Japanese authorities to highlight Anitube as one of the largest piracy sites in the country, alongside names such as Nyaa Torrents, The Pirate Bay and illegal manga distribution portals.
What happened to Anitube?
In 2014, the government of Japan began identifying and taking down pirate sites that facilitated the illegal distribution of anime around the world. One of the targets of the anti-piracy operation was Anitube, which continued to operate for some time, even receiving judicial notices and having more than 12,000 links removed by Google.
In 2016, the site went offline in Brazil out of nowhere. At the time, the makers of Anitube told al Otaku PT that ownership of the site had been sold to Japanese investors. The decision, however, was not made due to legal issues, but rather because it was too expensive to keep Anitube running, as the servers cost more than $31,000 a month.
One of the first decisions made by the new owners of Anitube was to shut down the service in Brazil and all countries of the world except Japan on May 6, 2016. Soon after, the creators of Anitube split and created other sites to continue distributing anime online under other names, such as Anitube Brasil and Branitube.
Anitube has ceased to exist, but its legacy lives on
Despite having stopped working in 2016, Anitube has left its legacy in the form of other sites that continue to offer anime online illegally to this day. To combat these portals, official streaming services such as Crunchyroll, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have started including more Japanese productions in their catalogues.
With Crunchyroll, it’s even possible to watch anime officially and for free, with some limitations. For example, free users are not entitled to Simulcast (simultaneous broadcasting with Japan) and can only access a limited number of titles.
Image: Playback/Anitube.
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Source: Olhar Digital
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
