As part of their follow-up to the Ellation Studios announcement, Crunchyroll have created a press release to allay fears that the company is abandoning its support of the Japanese animation industry by creating a Western Studio that seemed more concerned with virtue signalling than content.
Contained within this statement was a second item, which is far more substantive - after years of continuing to utilise the outdated Flash player, the service will be introducing a new HTML5 player to (vastly) improve the quality of service currently offered to subscribers.
From the Press Release:
The most requested single feature we’ve seen is an HTML5 player on Crunchyroll web -- and it’s something that we’ve been working on for quite some time. Currently, a small, randomized percentage of our users are already being served the latest version of our new HTML5 player, as we continue to gather data and fix bugs.
We want to let everyone know that our new HTML5 player will soon be available to 100% of users, starting with a rollout to a quarter of all viewers next Tuesday, 8/28, and full rollout planned for September. If you can’t wait and would like to try it out yourself from now until 8/28 and have time to follow a set of technical instructions, please DM the CrunchyrollHTML CR account for information of how to opt-in. Please be aware for opt-in users, some level of technical knowledge is recommended.
