Winter has ended, and Spring is already upon us.
I’ve probably already used this opening once, or maybe twice.
I usually try to not reuse my opening lines for news posts, but this time,
I’m writing without any reference to the past posts I’ve written, so you’ll have to deal with what my creativity churns out.

I would like to start off with a reflection of what we’ve done with FFF the past year.
We’ve hit our fourth year of operations two weeks ago, as some of you have taken note of.
Last year was the year we started taking Blurays a lot more seriously.
It started getting its own seasonal news posts, we’ve increased the amount of shows we’re picking up,
and the amount of staff who’re working on Blurays have increased a lot.
We’ve started up peeps once again to offer low resolution content to fans who would like to play our releases on their phones
or tablets without going through the hassle of reencoding themselves.
We’ve completely overhauled our distribution process to better handle the increased
amount of content we release and to ensure the speeds don’t suffer as much.

What I would like to aim to do this year is to build on what we already have and further refine it.
A major point I’d like to talk about would be the distribution process.
Our torrent and XDCC offerings have made much progress compared to how they were a year ago,
but our Achilles’ heel still lies with our DDL.
Offering a DDL is getting more and more difficult for us to do without an increase in cost.
We’ve went from being able to offer all of our content with a 100mbit limited to 3TB a month to
an unmetered 100mbit, to a 200mbit server, to 100TB gigabit servers.
We’ve tried to keep costs below $120 in total, but as you go higher with the disk space and bandwidth required,
you lose out in the quality of the peering and speed suffers as a result.
A lot of feedback has been given regarding our most recent server switch at
the beginning of the year and we’ve decided to make changes for the better.
We’re going with a more premium provider with much better peering vs our previous host.
The people we’ve asked to test the new server have remarked that the speed has greatly improved compared to the previous server,
and we expect the change to be welcomed and urge users who’ve switched to torrents to try using the DDL again.
The server is located in Texas, and we have plans to offer a European server for our European users,
should the usage be enough to warrant it. Asian or Australian users however, will probably not get a local server,
due to the high cost of bandwidth in said regions.
We’ll be monitoring the bandwidth usage over the next few months and making more changes.
This is also why we’re asking for $250 a month now instead of $120, to help cover the costs of the faster server.

Another major area of concern is regarding communication.
Recently, there’s been a lot of feedback regarding the lack of communication we have between us and the end users.
At the moment, we have the blog, Facebook page, IRC and a few staff have Twitter.
We’ve been looking into alternative ways of answering questions.
An immediate idea that comes to mind is using emails.
Unlike the blog comments, which aren’t as easy to keep track of, emails are easier to keep track of.

Now that we’re done with the miscellaneous things, here are our Bluray plans.

Winter Blurays
Buddy Complex – Commie
Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! Ren – FTW & Commie
D-Frag! – Vivid
Inari, Konkon, Koi Iroha – Vivid
Mahou Sensou – FFF
Noragami – FFF
Nourin – kdfss
Saki Zenkoku-hen – Underwater-FFF
Witch Craft Works – FFF

Before you start writing your angry comments about why we’re not doing Nisekoi, Sekai Seifuku
or any other Bluray series you might have expected or wished we would have done,
I’d like to mention that there’re only so many series we can handle at once.
We have picked up a substantial amount of Fall series, given how much we enjoy the season, and will focus on working on them first.

So, without further ado, let us proceed to the main point of this post,
which is actually pretty expected given that we’ve released half of them.

New
DATE A LIVE II
Love Live! S2
Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei
No Game No Life
Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin
Seikoku no Dragonar

Ongoing
Nisekoi

We’ll be finishing up Hoozuki no Reitetsu and Sekai Seifuku alongside these.
That’s it for this season’s post.