Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

Post by Baeocystin » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 5:23 AM UTC

mastazi wrote: post #17

trothamel wrote: post #5

This 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.

Yes 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...

Post by 0x2d123 » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

GauntletWizard wrote: post #16

usernamebias wrote: post #2

20 years from now. Sony acquires Kissanime.

I'm waiting for them to acquire SadPanda.

Post by Cyph0n » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

nsoonhui wrote: post #7

mindcandy wrote: post #4

A 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 upl…

Wasn't this the path of YouTube also?

Post by numpad0 » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 5:38 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #15

zdw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anime 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 lan…

I think that Crunchyroll was successful because Japanese media companies considered the US market a joke. The companies that distribute anime in Japan never tried to sell into the US, they just assumed we weren't interested. Crunchyroll could then show up, say they had some customers willing to pay, and decided $LOW was better than $FREE. It's still this way; you can buy anime box sets in the US for an entire series…

Post by flanbiscuit » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 6:02 AM UTC

zdw wrote: post #12

mindcandy wrote: post #4

A 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 upl…

Anime 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 lan…