Proposal for a weekly anime watch chat event

Question

I'd like to propose a weekly anime watching discussion event akin to anime and movie watching clubs. The goal is to promote more discussion and question for lesser known series that deserve recognition, but are not in the mainstream yet.

The pace can be one or two series with an episode or two each a week, to accommodate people's schedules. People will be able to watch ahead, but spoilers on future episodes will be discouraged to not spoil anything for people going at normal pace.

If possible, I'd like to have one older series and/or one newer series going on at the same time every week. The idea is to watch an episode before hand and get to together and discuss aspects. Live watching may get a bit too complicated and might disrupt the flow/mood of the show (not to mention setting up for finding a stream).

We can use our old chat cast time (Saturday, 1900 UTC) as the meeting time to accommodate people in different time zones.

In terms of availability of a series, we can look at currently available legal/more reputable streaming sources, like (but not limited to) Crunchyroll, Funanimation, Hulu, Netflix, and Daisuki. Other fansub sources maybe acceptable as well as long as the content is safe and readily available to users.

What are your thoughts about us hosting this type of event in our "Reviews and Recommendations" chat room? Any points or counterpoints? Other suggestions?

Answer 1

If done right, this (at least the new show) could be useful for generating questions about currently airing shows, which are likely to bring an increase in traffic during their airtime. If we are going to do that, we should probably pick something that looks to be relatively popular. Not necessarily the top show of the season, but something that a significant number of people are watching and which will bring in some traffic.

I'm a bit less enthusiastic about the older shows, mostly because it's going to vary who has seen what. Legal free distribution methods are also less common for older shows. I still think it could work, but it's not as convenient as watching a new show as it airs.

How to coordinate it seems like the biggest issue. First, there's not going to be a time block that works for everyone. In addition, it's not totally clear to me what we're supposed to discuss. Are we going to be watching the anime and simultaneously commenting, or watching on our own and then gathering every week to talk about the episode, or something else?