Prescreening vs Airing early

It's still quite unusual in the grand scheme of things (in the anime industry) - I believe Nagatoro S2 was ABEMA's first attempt at using this model to attract subscribers, which contributed to the initial weirdness with Crunchyroll's scheduling.

Versions of an anime with different degrees of censorship airing at different times is an ancient practice in the anime world when it comes to heavy ecchi/borderline-hentai anime of course, but there is almost always a "core" version that is most heavily censored that airs first for general anime audiences, and (traditionally) a less censored version on AT-X that airs later or the next day, and for anything else, you had to wait for the DVDs/BDs.

Now that anime streaming actually, you know, exists in Japan, it has kind of mixed things up, since censorship isn't necessarily required on streaming, though they usually keep some degree of censorship so as not to cut into BD sales too much. ABEMA seems to be driving much of this chaos.

Hataraku Saibou 2 and Black were a true anomaly, as production committees would usually rather cut their throats than let something appear on Western streaming services before Japanese TV, because they know it will instantly be uploaded to piracy sites, and Japanese anime fans will jump on those releases like a cokehead on a bag of powder, directly cutting into their viewership numbers, which affects the perceived popularity of the program by the network and advertisers, resulting in less valuable ads or even a move to a less lucrative tomorrow timeslot, directly impacting their revenue.

I'm not sure what black magic CR used to make that situation happen, but my bet is it involved big bags of money, ritual latin chanting and several truckloads of puppies sacrificed to one of the more twisted Dukes of hell. I wouldn't count on seeing that happen ever again.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make, as per the first line of this post, is that pre-airing a series on a premium channel or streaming service in Japan is overall still a fairly rare exception.

Anything pre-aired is generally immediately ripped and uploaded to the web, where it is then downloaded en-masse by Japanese fans, resulting in a sharp drop in viewership numbers for the actual broadcast, the advertising revenue from which is the second largest revenue source for production committees after BD sales. To prove the point, the first episode of this series has already been uploaded to the Meow site, and downloaded over 1,600 times, which, for an anime of this caliber in Japan, is a pretty big chunk of viewers that will now not watch it on broadcast - and that was only from one site, and not counting pirate streaming pages.

(Second) anyway, if ABEMA does find success in this model and can convince production committees to let them exclusively pre-air their series earlier, either by the aforementioned cash and blood sacrifice method, or simply by buying a big enough seat on the production committee, we will begin to see this happen more often going forward.

Industry implications aside, what that means for Anilist users, particularly those who rely on Anichart, is that the information there will become increasingly unreliable for release-time information. And, since, unlike AniDB which aims to be the ultimate historical record for all anime, Anilist's whole purpose, aside from being Twitter for teen/tween anime fans, is to help people keep track of release times and personal viewing habits, that will directly affect the site's usefulness for everything unrelated to posting cringy teen anime-philosophy and major spoilers on general.

In the end, the user base here isn't very likely to care about when an anime episode pre-airs on a Japanese streaming service they will never ever use because they don't speak Japanese and fan-subbing is sadly dead. What they will be interested in is being notified when, roughly, an episode will be available for them to watch on a legal streaming service they can actually access, or ahem other places.

Since accuracy and uniformity of information seems to be quite important to you, which I can respect (I have myself spent what adds up to a quite significant amount of time over the years updating AniDB entries and quadruple-checking initial public release dates for OP/EDs to make sure they are accurate), as I mentioned before, a quick and easy way to retain that first-air information would be annotating the series description.

A cleaner, sexier, more work-intensive way, depending on your DB structure/setup, would be to simply add new fields to the series construct for Japanese release date/time and episode number, initialize those fields with the current airing schedule data for all existing series entries, then add those fields to the series information bar. Have it default to be set to equal the values of the existing fields, modify that manually for the series for which it differs, and set the fields to only be displayed when it does. It shouldn't be too hard to implement aside from potentially having to take the site down for (conservatively) an hour or so during low-traffic to update the DB - again, I know nothing about what Anilist is running on the back end, it could all just be spiders back there for all I know, but, assuming it is something SQL-ish, an hour a day for a week or two would be an extremely conservative estimate even if everything that could go wrong ends up doing so.

There are naturally a variety of ways you could expand on this idea, or implement it differently, but it's fundamentally pretty simple, and, being directly aligned with supporting one of the site's core features, I don't think it qualifies as scope creep or extraneous feature development.

But, like I said before, I'm not an Anilist mod, admin or dev, nor do I even know how strictly those roles are separated here (I've had to jump between all three before, and really hope you aren't stuck with that), so you do whatever you think is best.

I'm just a regular old user, who just wants to see the trains run on time, and since I happened to notice that this one wasn't, I wanted to bring it up and see what could be done about it, by treating it either as a rare exception, or, in the case this sort of thing starts occuring more frequently in the future, to recommend you have a plan in place to deal with it.

The airing schedule is a pretty important feature, but it's of the type that you only really recognize the importance of when it fails at its job. I would just cry much like it to continue to be one that regular users (like me!) can safely rely on without having to double check the interwebs for each series to confirm whether the date/time listed is actually one that has any relevance to the actual availability in the West.

Sorry for taking up your time with my wall of text, and again, in the end, you guys/girls/flying spaghetti monsters just do you - I just wanted to at least speak my piece on the subject, since I do feel it is an important one, even if it currently seems rather minor.

Thanks, and goodnight.