>>55739065Linear TV's a dying medium in the west, especially for children or teen animation. Nickelodeon used to be the biggest channel for this sort of thing, but even CartoonNetwork and Disney are cycling through shit from 10 years ago mixed with a couple of new shows back to back. The fact that CartoonNetwork was willing to lose the entire Pokemon library after XY shows how limited the format is for what they want Anipoke to accomplish. Streaming is the long game, and Nintendo's always been good about the long game. Sure, they could find a streaming deal that lets them do streaming and TV (maybe Paramount+ for Nick, Max for CN, or Disney+ for Disney), but Netflix has the largest reach and is the most widely available. At the end of the day, Anipoke is a commercial for merchandise and the games. The platform needs to be as big as possible, and Netflix trumps the other streaming platforms by a wide margin.
This doesn't excuse how fucking dog awful their actual distribution on Netflix has been. The dub should've been ready online as soon as MPM ended in the west, at the very latest. They used to have one or two episodes ready as teasers even when the current anime was going back when it was on KidsWB or CartoonNetwork.