Funimation and Crunchyroll Parting Ways by usotaku
If you haven’t seen the news yet then yes, Cruchyroll and Funimation are ending their 2 year licensee sharing agreement in November. The Sony owned subsidiary Funamation has decided to go its separate way as Sony hopes to build the brand up to be the go to for sub and dub anime in the world. While ambitions are good and create further competition among anime streaming companies Funamation is already a power house in the anime world with thousands of titles under its umbrella already and this move creates another pay wall behind which some of the most popular anime will be locked in the future.
Presently though this won’t affect current simualcasting shows such as Attack on Titian and My Hero Academia as well as any property licensed during the partnership will still stream on both services. If your a VRV premium subscriber you’ll instead be getting access to Hidive as Crucnhyroll partners with them to continue to provide a premium service through VRV. I’m not sure what this means over all for Crunchyroll but when Sony and Funimation begin focusing on similar services we might see a huge shift in the anime world especially if the rummors are true and Sony is planning an exclusive service for Playstation owners only.
What is for certain is that as the landscape changes some of us will have some decisions to make on where we consume our anime and we may see Crunchyroll’s dominance slip a fair bit in the near future especially if they continue to neglect their user interface and customer desires. They do however, have plenty of time to grow in order to stem the tide and I would hope they make the effort to focus on that rather than investing in things their base customer has zero interest in and not on improving their services. At this point only time will tell how all of this affects the western anime industry and how it will play out but over all it may be good for the consumers because it will force these companies to provide a more a desirable service. What are your thoughts on the break up and how do you think it will affect us? Until next time, jane!
Article source: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2018-10-18/funimation-crunchyroll-end-content-sharing-partnership/.138330
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