Same name, different site
Anyone who watched free anime a few years back knows AniWave. It started life as 9anime, rebranded to AniWave in 2023, and shut down for good in 2024. The name was too famous to stay empty for long, and aniwavetv.live is one of the sites that picked it up. It uses the AniWave name and the purple wave logo, but it has nothing to do with the team behind the original. Think of it as a new free anime site wearing an old jacket.
That doesn’t automatically make it bad. It just means you should judge it on what it does today, not on what AniWave used to be.
What you see when it loads
The homepage is light and airy: a soft lavender card, the AniWave logo, “FREE ANIME STREAMING” in small caps, and a big search bar with the hint “Search an anime, e.g. One Piece…”. Under it a counter says you’re searching through 9,069+ titles. Four buttons sit above the search (Latest releases, Browse the archive, Genres, Calendar), and the top menu adds Random and a login link. There’s even a dark-mode toggle in the corner.
Scroll down and the page turns into a long FAQ (“Is AniWave safe to use?”, “Is AniWave legal?”) written mostly for Google. It’s a bit of a padded front door, but the useful stuff is all at the top, so it doesn’t get in the way.
What it provides
The promise is the usual free-anime package: Japanese audio with subtitles and English dubs for most shows, the current season alongside long-running classics, a weekly release calendar, and several servers per episode so you can switch when one stalls. No account is needed to watch; signing up only adds a watchlist and history. The genre list covers everything from isekai and mecha to sports and slice of life.
Ads and safety
The homepage shows no banners, and nothing popped up while I looked around. Under the hood, though, it loads the same ad scripts I’ve seen on other copycat sites (rapidadexchange.com and usrpubtrck.com) plus window.open popup code, so expect pop-unders once you’re in the player. The site’s own FAQ basically admits this and tells you to use an ad blocker. I agree with it on that one.
Should you use it?
For a quick episode it does the job: fast to load, works fine on a phone, easy to search. Just don’t treat it as the AniWave you remember. It’s an unofficial clone with pop-up ads behind the clean front, and anime streaming clones tend to come and go. If you can, support the shows on Crunchyroll or another licensed service, and keep a second site from our anime list bookmarked.
