The ongoing and rather poorly executed merger of Funimation and Crunchyroll certainly isn’t helping in my circles. After years of subscribing to Animelab, which

The ongoing and rather poorly executed merger of Funimation and Crunchyroll certainly isn’t helping in my circles. After years of subscribing to Animelab, which merged into Funimation in rather poor fashion, I was abruptly told no new content would be added and that I should sign up for Crunchyroll, never mind that my annual subscription had renewed a month prior. Crunchyroll then announced that annual subscribers would be given credit for their remaining time, but no timeframe was given and after waiting months, I ended up getting a refund last week and am now looking for another company to give my money to. Unfortunately they all seem to be owned by the same group now, with ongoing concerns around quality and conditions for the voice actors working on their content, so for now I have started buying physical media again from the Japanese distributors to at least register my interest in these shows in some way. Content in Australia has aways been a bit of a mess and I can’t see the market improving, meaning to me the conditions that I believe drive piracy are only set to continue and expand. We really need less exclusivity in the market and more of a competitive landscape for sourcing existing content. I’m happy to deal with a few extra players for original content, but needing 5 different subscriptions to watch all of Stargate, Star Trek, and Star Wars is never going to work for me.