Os2 Anime was a service that provided online streaming episodes anime using YouTube.com, starting January 2006. No episodes were uploaded by Keiichi Anime Forever, and Os2 Anime served merely as an index. Os2 Anime became the first service of its kind by creating the first index of television episodes. However, Os2 Anime stuck to anime episodes only. Given Os2 Anime's position as the forefront of the boom, Os2 Anime received a large number of visitors seeking episodes.
The initial collection of episodes consisted of only scattered ones for BLEACH and episodes one through three for Air. The second batch of episodes were for Naruto, Love Hina, and Tsubasa Chronicle.
Original plans were to not index licensed shows, but because the availability of any anime on YouTube was not substantial, this idea was disregarded and everything that could be found was added. Episodes for non-English languages made its debut at this time as well. The first non-English episode was for Card Captor Sakura in Spanish. The lack of episodes available on YouTube was disappointing, and special features named Anime Samplers were created by sk89q to temporarily remedy it. They would feature only first episodes from different anime series in order for visitors to trial anime series. Several Anime Samplers were created when many shows were found to only have the first episode uploaded.
A team was set up to handle looking for new episodes and checking for deleted ones. The whole index was completely managed in-house and contributed by only the staff. They successfully found hundreds of episodes. Over time, little by little, Os2 Anime became big. For two or three days during this period, contributions were accepted publicly. Due to the volume of submissions, contributions were closed quickly after opening and never re-opened.
Os2 Anime spread around the Internet, especially around on forums by word of mouth. Because Os2 Anime was revolutionary and the first, it sparked a large number of copy-cat sites such as Galbadia Hotel and *PeekVid *that either built their own index or copied the index hosted by Keiichi Anime Forever. A notable attribute of sites that copied Keiichi Anime Forever's index was that they still maintained the anime samplers that were unique to Os2 Anime. For a while, none of these sites were perceived as a threat because they could not update at the speed of Os2 Anime nor did they have the technological expertise to build their own video player to replace YouTube's limited one.
However, these thefts came at a cost, not only to Os2 Anime, but to every anime video index site. As no technological restrictions were implemented (by choice) to prevent leeching the index of Os2 Anime, several sites had the same exact list of episodes. One of these websites, PeekVid, whose owner also contacted Keiichi Anime Forever regarding partnership, was featured on a C|NET article in the second quarter of 2006, prompting YouTube to delete nearly all the episodes on this list. Nearly all the content was gone; 137 single series were deleted. Only 39.2% of the original archive still existed. This rendered most of these copy-cat sites extinct because they were unable to correct their index. KAF was, however, quick to remove the deleted episodes.
With the majority of episodes missing, user submissions were re-opened by the middle of 2006 as a means to restore the index. However, as a result of this, the quality of the index considerably diminished and many irrelevant or miscategorized episodes were added to the index. The team was no longer responsible for adding episodes - only for accepting submissions. Although all submissions were checked by a team of at least five people, as Os2 Anime was the first site and it had gained a considerably amount of popularity, the volume of submissions measured in hundreds or thousands in a day. The team could not keep up with the generous contributions by the Os2 Anime users.
By the end of the third quarter of 2006, all contributions were closed. No team was assigned to add new episodes. Episodes were occasionally deleted manually with a scripted program, but the collection did not grow. By the end of 2006, the service was effectively dead. However, the service was not shutdown until the end of 2007. During 2007, the index was rarely checked for deleted episodes.
Although the service brought a large volume of users, the forum became filled with rude or unrespectful users. It was figured that, because anime episodes bring a much larger audience, the less-desired also came along also. As a result, plans were discussed to close Os2 Anime after a few months of operation. However, this was not realized due to the deletion set on by C|NET and plans were changed.
A change was enacted in the first half of 2006 to limit the length of all newly uploaded videos to ten minutes. As a result of this, unless the uploader had a Director account, the episode had to be split into parts. Although Os2 Anime was quick to react to his change by adding part support, it added burden to both the viewer and the staff.
Os2 Anime was temporarily broken once when YouTube decided to remove the extension .php from all their dynamic files. YouTube's website saw the same changes.
Another internal change YouTube made broke Os2 Anime's player for a short while until discovery. The YouTube service required a time-sensitive signature to be sent with every video request for it to be streamed. This was solved initially by replacing KAF's in-house built player with YouTube's temporarily, and then later with a better custom built one. The newer KAF player inventively loaded YouTube's actual player into KAF's video player, extracted this time-sensitive value, discarded away the YouTube player, and loaded the video. As a result, Os2 Anime did not need to make use of a proxy service on the server to query YouTube for this variable. Statistics for YouTube were not affected; Keiichi Anime Forever did not have to take on additional CPU and bandwidth usage; and Os2 Anime preemptively prevented any possible type of blocking on YouTube's end.
In order to be the most effective website at updating the index, the KAF team had a very systematized process to find and add episodes.
To aid in the finding of new episodes, Os2 Anime's team had access to their own custom YouTube search utility that successfully excluded out most of the anime music videos and small videos. The eventual versions of the search had smart algorithms to selectively and automatically name identify the episodes (it became especially a burden when parts were required).
The team had to add series via a relatively slow way because Os2 Anime followed Keiichi Anime Forever's mission policy of providing the most complete service. Staff members had to submit a description about the anime if a new category was to be created for a newly-added anime. However, search tools were provided to quickly gather description information from AnimeNewsNetwork and AnimeNfo.
A report tool was added to the Os2 management interface that would automatically check every episode to see if it still existed on YouTube's servers.
The first day Os2 Anime was released, the episodes and series were loaded from .xml files from a directory. An index was generated from these .xml files on the fly. Modifying the flat database of episodes became a burden and a downtime risk as more episodes had to be added manually through a text editor. To remedy the problem, the system was moved to a relational database setup. All episodes were updated in the database and then cached in files to balance the load
Last updated 00:26, 15, May 2008.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 United States License.
