Bandai Channel Streams Phantom Blood

Bandai Channel, Bandai’s anime streaming service, is doing us an interesting favor as part of an interesting service.

I’m demonstrably no expert in the Japanese language, but when three tweets in a row have the same link, it’s probably a pretty notable link. That link leads to the promotional page for Bandai Channel’s service to stream the Phantom Blood anime.

According to what I can tell from the page, it looks like streaming of the whole Part 1 including Episode 9 is set to start on December 6th before the first episode of Battle Tendency airs. It will be a live stream starting at 21:00 until 1:30 on probably Japanese Standard Time.

The promo page also mentions a promotional video for Part 2, but looking around for it hasn’t given me anything, even on the JoJo’s Official Website where you’d expect there to be such a thing, especially on the Special page where they have the promo video for the series and Part 1. It’s possible that it’s talking about the first episode being free as a promotion, that favor I mentioned, where you have to pay for each episode after that. If you follow the last blue link on the promo page, you’re taken to a JoJo’s video page on Bandai Channel.

You can see the Free Episode 1 there towards the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, Bandai Channel doesn’t offer its services States side, so I can’t actually watch this video. It may be the promotional Part 2, but if you click the largest button there, it brings up the synopsis of Episode 1 and you can cycle through all the episodes up to Episode 8, so I’m guessing that’s just the streaming service for the show. All the other buttons are Characters, Cast, Story, external links, and a mailto.

For all of you reading this in a country that supports Bandai Channel, there you go. For the everyone else, I think it’s cool that Bandai is getting to do this and is offering this service since the Blu-rays are hugely expensive for two episodes a pop. From what I can see, this doesn’t have the English subtitle option, though that may be in the video once you’ve got it playing. If you feel up to tricking a website into believing you’re from Japan, then you might just dodge those Blu-ray prices.

(Non-Twitter images from Bandai Channel, © Bandai Visual, Warner Bros., davidproduction)