King Funimation Is Dead, All Hail King Crunchyroll

Remember when AT&T bit off more than it could chew and started to regret buying Warner Bros? They first tried to deal with that by offloading various sub-companies, one of them being the anime streaming service Crunchyroll. Sony, who owns the competing service Funimation, took the offer, which leads us to today, March 1…the day when two become one.

The only remaining question was which name would eat the other, and now we know. Even though Sony started with Funimation, they seem to consider the Crunchyroll name a stronger brand, so they just announced they’re killing the Funimation brand and making everything Crunchyroll. Funimation Global Group LLC will be renamed Crunchyroll LLC, and it will adopt this name worldwide.

Does this create a monopoly? Depends on how you look at it. As of now Crunchyroll is the only (legal) anime streaming service in the US, but Big Stream has taken notice of anime’s potential profitability and is investing in exclusives. JoJo: Stone Ocean, for example, was bought wholesale by Netflix and each episode says “A Netflix Series” on it now. There is still technically competition, just not the kind nakedly visible. We admit things could be better.

Apparently the Funimation app will linger on for a few more months, with the only new content being additional episodes of existing shows, but anything brand-new will premiere on Crunchyroll. As for what to do with your current Funimation subscription, there doesn’t seem to be a method of transferring it over to Crunchyroll yet, with their FAQ making the lazy suggestion that people just cancel their Funi accounts and make a new one over at Crunchy “when they’re ready.”

A lot of Crunchyroll’s content can be viewed for free with ads, but the ad-free tiers and exclusive content start at $7.99 a month for Fan, rise to $9.99 a month for Mega Fan and $14.99 a month for Ultimate Fan. Eighty percent of Funimation’s library will be on Crunchyroll by the end of this month.