This news is making a big splash in the collecting communities but i haven't seen anything about it on tumblr yet so:
The Crunchyroll store will be paywall-locked to the top two subscription tiers of paying users only starting in August. Anime physical media will be cut off for purchase without a minimum of a $140/year subscription.
Currently CR is the only place selling Aniplex titles, and those are already horrifically expensive on their own. Now CR (owned by Sony) is saying you can't even spend that money without paying for the privilege of shopping there.
This is 100% another symptom of Sony's monopoly practices. 10 to 15 years ago we had a variety of distributors for physical media. RightStuf, Aniplex, Funimation, and Crunchyroll were all independent of each other and all of them offered different series. In the last decade Sony bought and merged them all, dropped dozens of Funimation titles when porting them to Crunchyroll, closed the RightStuf warehouse distributors, and has been clear-cutting the Crunchyroll store which had turned into the only distributor of all those previous sources. 90% of the stock of physical products has been cleared from the shop and what's left are slim pickings of a few massively expensive popular titles. This is the same Sony that promises that physical discs will not be offered for games for the PS6, so I don't have high hopes for their plan for continuing releasing physical media.
Anime is already harder to source, as buying directly from Japanese publishers often doesn't include English subtitles and certainly won't have dubbed audio. If a US licensing company's license expires, the series will go out of print and vanish from streaming with literally no warning and often never coming back. (Just this month Crunchyroll lost over a dozen titles, including Barakamon and Black Lagoon among others.) Physical media is also one of the only ways that older bonus content is preserved, like dub directors commentary or interviews with the cast, and sometimes if a series is relicensed for streaming, it has to be altered (such as Evangelion's rerelease losing the rights to play the original set of Fly Me To the Moon endings and the original dub).
Where do I get physical media now?
The r/AnimeCollectors and r/AnimeDeals subreddits share resources for sales, deals, and places to look to find a specific series you might be hunting for.
AnimeDeals specifically also has users that highlight ebay stores that often resell deadstock from Walmart/Target at steep discounts, so keep your eye out for those. Recently picked up the full series of Yuu Yuu Hakusho for a total of $35!
There are still some competing distributors of new-print anime. Sentai Filmworks, MediaOCD, and DiabolikDVD are all distributors that sell things CR won't. Sentai is currently running a summer sale and the subreddits will point out good prices when they come around.
Amazon (ugh) does often sell Crunchyroll series that CR's own store doesn't stock anymore. Recently the redditor Aside_Intrepid also released a guide on how to use Amazon's location data to find location-based coupons that apply to blu-ray as well. The same instructions can be found on blu-ray.com
Buy a regionless dvd and blu-ray player and buy Region 2 discs. They're usually still the US dub with English subtitles, but STEEPLY cheaper than US licensed releases.
Keep an eye on secondhand media stores, FB Marketplace, and animedeals for people destashing and selling their collections. Thrifting can land you some great finds, especially for harder-to-obtain older series.
Piracy and torrenting are always options, and with how the industry (especially Sony and Netflix) seem to despise physical media it's likely that more and more people will have to lean on that as their primary step. I do love piracy but I also love my physical media collection!
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