Sony wanted to acquire Crunchyroll for almost a Billion dollars!
For almost 957 million US dollars, Sony wanted to buy Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll is one of the few streaming services where you can watch and binge Anime fresh out of Japan with either English Subtitles or English voice acting. Crunchyroll started as an upload site where fans uploaded fansubbed Anime.
It was a former pirated Anime site like the defunct Kissanime, but it transitioned into a legit streaming service with permission from Animation Studios. Crunchyroll has 70 million subscribers and 3 million of them as premium customers. Basic subscribers can watch for free, but they would have to endure ads and have a limitation on how many episodes they can stream in a day. Premium members won’t have ads, and they can binge all day long. They also have access to exclusive premium content.
If Sony successfully acquired this service, it would have a library of over 1,000 Animation titles from Japan. It is not the first time Sony purchased an Anime streaming service. Back in 2017, Sony acquired Funimation, A company that distributes Professionally English dubbed Anime to a western and global audience.
100 Million people watch Anime on Netflix alone around the world. That fact could be enough reason for Sony to want a slice of that pie. Anime had been one of the most successful contents on Netflix, that aside from distributing, Netflix had produced Anime originals.Some fans are nervous about what changes with Crunchyroll once it changes ownership. Sony does have a streaming service called crackle, and it usually streams movies and western content. Crackle does have Anime as part of its roster. It owns the Library of the cable channel Animax.
Some fans are concerned if Crunchy roll will continue as its very own entity if Sony succeeds in buying this brand. Being absorbed by crackle is a possibility.