[OTAKU] Major shake-up in the US anime industry

[Zen]

Well, the other day, the two biggest names in the US anime industry jumped into bed together. Crunchyroll, the nation's largest simulcast streaming site, and Funimation, the nation's largest home video distributor, announced a where Crunchyroll will handle the streaming of subtitled simulcast titles for all new content for Funimation, Funimation will provide streaming for "Broadcast Dubs" of select Cruncyroll titles on their website, and Funimation will handle distribution of home video and "electronic sell through" for Crunchyroll releases. As part of this, Funimation seems to be trimming down their own web streaming site to be dub only, so I believe they may be transferring over more than just NEW titles to Cruchyroll, but also their older subtitled titles as well. However, it is possible they may still stream the older subtitled titles from their own site in addition to the dubs. They are, however, decreasing their subscription prices based on decreased offerings on their site, and discontinuing their "subtitle only" subscription package, which I didn't even know they offered.

On the surface, this looks like a massive win for the younger company, Crunchyroll, as they get their foot in the door of the home distribution business, which they had announced at one of the summer conventions as a plan for this year, without having to invest in the infrastructure to do it themselves, use the dubbing expertise of the number 1 distributor in the nation's localization team to help them along the way, and increase their catalog by leaps and bounds, at least for what they are able to offer to US and Canadian customers. (Crunchyroll is a worldwide streaming site, but the deal with Funimation only covers US and Canadian territories. Interestingly enough, I had found over the past couple of years that many of the titles that Funimation licensed were being licensed by Crunchyroll for streaming in locations outside of the US and Canada as well, so this might give them the same titles as worldwide outside of Asia or maybe even worldwide outside of Japan in some cases.)

Funimation has announced that they are increasing their dub budget accordingly, with plans to dub several extra shows each season. Crunchyroll has been the most aggressive company at licensing simulcast titles over the past several years, usually purchasing rights to two to three times the number of titles of their competitors each season and showing over 30 shows per three month block on a regular basis.