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Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll
- usernamebias 6y ago20 years from now. Sony acquires Kissanime.
- Beaver117 6y agoLittle late there buddy, they died 4 months ago.
- gibolt 6y agoI literally had found it just a month prior to shutdown, and finished a show a few days before. Extremely disappointing news
- GauntletWizard 6y agoI'm waiting for them to acquire SadPanda.
- 0x2d123 6y agolmao, that might be too obscure for HN
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fomine3 6y agomeow
- RavlaAlvar 6y agoOr Hanime
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoHentaiHaven never died
- ionwake 6y agoWhy did Kissanime die but crunchyroll succeed?
- neurostimulant 6y agoThey never intended to go legal in the first place, and the lawyers eventually got them.
- mindcandy 6y agoA billion dollars is not bad for a site that started as a fake-it-til-you-make-it piracy site. I only know the story 4th-hand. But, my understanding is that it started as a user-upload site (I.e. piracy with disclaimers). And, of course, the seed users were actually employees with puppet accounts pirating media to their own site. That kicked off real users who competed on getting the highest quality subtitle jobs uploaded quickest after the first broadcast of a given show in Japan. Once viewers outside of Japan learned that they could get episodes same-day as Japan, they flocked to CR. Of course, this was only possible because CR did not attempt the impossible task of convincing the producers to allow this to be possible. Once the CR audience was high enough, there were two obvious consequences: 1) They were too big to fly under the radar and were likely to be sued soon. 2) Their audience was large enough to be offered in negotiation with the publishers for a legit contract. So, that's what they did. They offered a fair revenue split with the publishers in exchange for being a legitimized distributor. There are lots of ways that this could have gone badly. Most piracy sites do as much as possible to exploit the material and the viewers for short-term gain. Most publishers reasonably lawyer-stomp such sites as fast as is feasible. But, in this case it worked out. There's no way CR could have negotiated with the publishers up-front. They were starting with nothing at all to offer. No audience. No reputation. No capital. Nothing. Their approach was not legal. But, it was small and respectful-ish enough to not be worth suing until it was large and respectful-ish enough to be worth negotiating with. Do not recommend this business plan. Glad it worked out for them.
- zdw 6y agoAnime fansubs have been around for 3-4 decades (ever since the early Amiga could overlay subs) and digital for 20+. Interesting that it worked out for them, unlike what happened with music distribution, and then the Napster/iTunes/Spotify evolution. Probably helped that there was only extremely slow and expensive legitimate distribution channels and actual work was required to make the content accessible in other languages. Rakuten's Viki service is another interesting model - they license content, then give people early access and crowdsource the translations, where the only benefit of translating is getting the $5-10 monthly service for free.
- 6y ago
- trothamel 6y agoThis is interesting because it means the two big distributors of anime in the US are now one. It's creating a monopsony from the perspective of the anime studios, though I suspect a rival will emerge shortly.
- mastazi 6y agoYes that's right AnimeLab is owned by Sony. I wonder if they are going to consolidate the two into one service. There is currently a lot of overlap between the two catalogues and I can't imagine that's good in the long term...
- Baeocystin 6y agoDoesn't Amazon have an anime-focused service? Or did that close down already?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIt died pretty much on the vine, although they still have a few licenses that got moved to Prime Video.
- snicker7 6y agoThis is a good thing. Anime outside of Japan is still niche. I don't want N competing streaming services. Even with a Funimation+Crunchyroll subscription, I still have to resort to less-than-legal means to watch some of my favourite material.
- ivegotnoaccount 6y agoWell... With this, in France, we now have the three big services owned by sony, and each makes you pay 5€/month. Don't think that because they bought Crunchyroll, they will merge rights and subscription. Why would they, that would make less money.
- Aerroon 6y ago
- mwlp 6y agoSony email from 2013: https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/1285 https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/1285
- an_opabinia 6y agoIt’s funny because CrunchyRoll was probably being honest with their numbers while Crackle was totally lying. No wonder Sony made the wrong call here.
- natchy 6y agoEh, Sony probably wouldn’t have hustled like CR did and grown it as well as it did. This was in 2013. They easily could have suffocated it in the last 7 years.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoMixed feelings. On the one side, there's a similar brouhaha about Yahoo (?) being able to acquire Google back when. On the other, if it was bought at that time by Sony, it probably would not have gained the traction that it does nowadays.
- Baeocystin 6y agoI wonder if they are going to merge content like they had before, or if they aim to segment the market in some way. I know Funimation is more known for rapid English dubs, for example.
- ivegotnoaccount 6y agoAs a french, not quite fan of this... We have only three big platforms for anime streaming (outside of Netflix, which catalog is still small here). One of them, Wakanim, was acquired by Aniplex, which is owned by Sony, years ago. The second, ADN, is owned by Kaze, which was bought by Crunchyroll. So now that Crunchyroll is part of Sony, they have a near-monopoly on both VOD and physical releases. We are lucky in that Wakanim is allowed to sell DRM-free episodes for 1€, I hope this won't change with this and the ongoing talks about removing geologist in the EU.
- scaladev 6y agoMaybe they'll make more of their library available in my country. CR expects me to pay exactly the same subscription fee as in the US, but allows me to watch less than 1% of their library. Of course, I can always try to find a residential US proxy, but I ain't doing it to get access to a _paid_ service, sorry. Needless to say, I continue to enjoy the convenience and non-discrimination of torrent trackers.
- smaili 6y agoHonestly I never understood why Netflix didn't make a stronger push to acquire them, it's such a great addition to their existing offerings and would boost their customer base as well.
- cmauniada 6y agoIf I had to guess, I would say because they would rather spend more cash on creating new content than acquiring niche content distribution that’s already out there. On top of that, the target audience has a big overlap. People who use crunchyroll most likely have Netflix accounts already. So it probably wouldn’t benefit them significantly.
- klmadfejno 6y agoI think Netflix's anime push is really strong if their goal is to get non-anime-dorks to watch anime. Most anime is pretty terrible, not unlike most tv, but unlike mainstream tv in that it has tons of uncomfortable sexism or weird pedo-inclinations. I find Netflix tends to only grab the better chunk of whats out there, and is funding some really strong original content, which I think is above the quality threshold of some of their live action shows (Great Pretender, BNA, Aggretsuko come to mind). I don't typically expect to like a random anime, but I'm trending towards changing that opinion if I encounter it on Netflix and I don't see a tasteless panty shot of a young girl in the first 30 minutes.
- Animats 6y agoFrom 2013 to 2017, there was Daisuki, which many thought was another pirate streaming site. But it was actually a project funded by the government of Japan and some major banks via the Cool Japan Fund.[1] The Japanese government has an organization to promote Japanese culture as a form of soft power. They're worried about K-Pop. They're currently funding Sentai.[1] [1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/about/cjfund.html https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/about/cjfund.html [2] https://www.sentaifilmworks.com/ https://www.sentaifilmworks.com/
- Danieru 6y agoWesterners appear to under estimate how much the anime industry is about connections, yet its challenge going west has been for lack of users. Sony's consolidation is all about getting users. Years back Bandai funded "daisuki" anime, which folded. In fact I worked in the same office as the executive who needed to fold down that division. Daisuki failed due to lack of users, not content. Likewise Sony tried a home spun distribution platform too, and folded it as well. Now years later with all that industry experience in hand Sony is moving in and consolidating. Bandai is licensing their stuff to Netflix domestically, as is Sony. Yet those contracts can switch in a moment if a domestic conglomerate secures the users. Sony appears to be making those moves and could establish Japan's strongest beachhead in the streaming wars. Japan cannot compete with Americans easy access to Hollywood negotiations, but likewise a Japanese platform should have strong negotiations securing anime.
- te_chris 6y agoI kind of follow this...but Sony pictures and Sony records are still huge players in the western creative markets.
- Aerroon 6y agoI think the reason they couldn't find enough users is that their offering just wasn't convenient/good enough compared to piracy. Not only was pirated content more accessible, it also often had better subtitling. Official subtitles seem to have way more localization than fansubs. This might be great to capture a broader audience, but it also means that the fans that are already there don't want to use your subs. Sometimes they'd just rather not watch a show than put up with your subs. Stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjUtoQaRfE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjUtoQaRfE0 What they probably should've done is what Qidian ended up doing with webnovel.com. They should've approached the fansubbers and the release groups and offered them a job. That way they would've retained the expertise and fanbase. It would've likely caused a lot of issues like Qidian did, but they would've likely had far more success. Alternatively, putting anime on places like Steam could've also been a good choice.
- aneutron 6y agoOh no.
- ArtWomb 6y agoBigger news in anime today is Chainsaw Man TV adaptation in development by MAPPA ;)
- the_lucifer 6y agoand the part 2 of the Manga