SONY has completed its deal to buy Crunchyroll, the popular anime streaming service. While they already own Funimation, another anime themed site, they hope to eventually bring the two together in a type of merge .
Crunchyroll has about 120 million registered users across more than 200 countries. Funimation has long list of 700 anime series on 15 platforms in 49 countries. With Sony’s buyout of Crunchyroll it will greatly expand the companies anime selection. Anime fans should be excited for this. They can now deliver more anime content for home theaters, events, gaming consoles and TV’s. The company completed its $1.175 billion acquisition on August 9. Sony’s said it hopes “to create a unified anime subscription experience as soon as possible.”
For now Crunchyroll and Funimation will continue to exist as separate streaming platforms. But be on the lookout for a merge in the near future. This will give anime fans a great experience and hopefully leading to more content and collaboration between anime’s. This will be a big competition for other streaming services to keep up in the anime world now that both these large streaming services are owned by the same corporation. Ellation’s VRV is attached to Crunchyroll and will be along side Sony as well. VRV is a subscription streaming service that has a large access of anime like Cartoon Hunger (indie Anime) and Roster Teeth (original online video). Sony is definitely posing to completely dominate the anime streaming industry.