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AnimeFLV, the largest Spanish-language anime piracy site on the internet, has stopped serving video to its tens of millions of monthly visitors. The site, which the MPA flagged as a notorious market in its latest USTR submission, remains online with its directory intact. However, the videos have been unavailable for weeks now, without any explanation from the operators.
Founded in 2010, AnimeFLV has been a dominant player in the anime piracy ecosystem for years.
The Spanish-language site is particularly popular in Latin America and served more than a billion annual visits at its height.
This popularity didn’t go unnoticed with rightsholders. The site has been on the anti-piracy radar for years and the Motion Picture Association (MPA) flagged the site in its most recent report to the U.S. Trade Representative.
According to the MPA, AnimeFLV’s operators are believed to be located in Peru, Chile, and Mexico. In the latter two countries, the anime portal is also among the 100 most-visited websites. However, due to recent changes this traffic rank will likely drop.
“There are currently no videos”
AnimeFLV ran without significant issues for years, but that changed in mid-June. While the site remained online with the content listings intact, the video player categorically returns the message “Actualmente no hay videos,” informing visitors that ‘there are currently no videos.’
In other words, the popular anime site has effectively become a ghost directory of series and movies.
Actualmente no hay vídeos (there are currently no videos)
Initial hiccups were reported in April already but the site recovered from those. By late June, however, bug reports on GitHub from the Aniyomi anime app’s extension tracker confirmed that AnimeFLV’s player returned no video sources at all.
The site’s operators have not issued any statement to this day. No anti-piracy organization has taken credit either, but the video disappearance comes at a time when several major anime and manga operations were dismantled.
A Wave of Pirate Site Shutdowns
In April, we reported that TuMangaOnline, also known as ZonaTMO, was shut down following an enforcement action from Korean rightsholders.
Also in April, the backend infrastructure of many prominent pirate sites was knocked offline. These sites were linked to the popular “Piracy-as-a-Service” operations such as MegaCloud and VidCloud, that also acted as a hosting platform.
A few weeks earlier, the massive anime pirate site HiAnime had already closed its doors. While this action long remained unexplained, earlier this month Vietnamese authorities eventually launched a criminal prosecution against seven people associated with the piracy ring.
While AnimeFLV’s issues fit in this bigger picture, we can’t independently link it directly to these earlier crackdowns. The mid-June date doesn’t directly link to any other known enforcement actions either.
A Valuable Ghost Directory
What makes AnimeFLV’s situation unusual is that the site hasn’t disappeared. The front end remains fully functional, and the ‘ghost’ directory is still being updated.
Why the operators remain silent on the video issues is food for speculation. However, the fact that they keep the site online suggests that it may not permanently close its doors. Whether it will continue as a directory-only site or something more has yet to be seen.
While AnimeFLV still gets plenty of residual traffic, Leiinad World notes that potential successors were quick to enter the scene too. This includes a newer site called AnimeAV1, which references the more modern AV1 codec, instead of the outdated and largely obsolete FLV (Flash) container format.
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