# On Funimation’s recently-announced licensing plan change

Funimation recently announced that, due to its acquisition by Sony, they would
be pulling all their shows from other streaming platforms —…

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### On Funimation’s recently-announced licensing plan change

Funimation recently announced that, due to its acquisition by Sony, they would
be pulling all their shows from other streaming platforms — eliminating their
groundbreaking Crunchyroll partnership deal (under which Funimation-licensed
simulcasts would automatically be available on Crunchyroll & Funimation’s back
catalog titles would periodically be added to Crunchyroll’s catalog).

While it’s unfortunate, this is also a return to the norm.

When Funimation started the Crunchyroll partnership only a year or two ago, it
came totally out of left field — anime fans had already been spending years
either dealing with the poor streaming support from Funimation exclusives,
waiting for them to circulate onto Netflix just to have them playable, or
simply ditching legal streaming altogether. We didn’t expect the Crunchyroll
partnership to happen, and once it happened, we shouldn’t have expected it to
last.

The more pressing issue is the Sony ownership: Sony is a frequent member of
production committees, and often has a stake in shows that it isn’t producing
by nature of owning UMG (and thus typically owning distribution rights for the
soundtracks and drama discs). Sony might pressure the projects it has a stake
in to favor Funimation for distribution — which, because Funimation’s
streaming site is borderline unusable, ultimately means a whole lot more shows
(and a lot of big shows — Sony owns Aniplex, for instance) being unavailable
for legal streaming.

The Vaguely Unpleasant case scenario is one where Sony attempts total
horizontal integration & has every Aniplex or Sony-produced show and every
show with UMG-licensed music (including library music) distributed by
Funimation — in other words, a world where Funimation has a total monopoly on
all popular shows (since even KyoAni relies on UMG for music distribution) and
a near-total monopoly on all other shows (since UMG is the largest record
company in the world & therefore owns a lot of library music and sound
effects), starving Crunchyroll & HiDive for licenses, while Funimation still
doesn’t have pressure to fix their streaming service’s reliability and
usability issues because nothing streams in Japan in the first place.

Such a world would be a return to 2003 in terms of availability of legal
streaming: fandom would be totally gutted, and fansubbing would rush in to
fill the gap in availability.

There’s no reason to believe that Sony will be so aggressive, but there’s also
no particular reason to believe that Sony *won’t* be: they’ve been aggressive
in the past, even in ways that were transparently stupid or myopic, and the
key question appears to be whether or not such a strategy has occurred to
them.

In the short term, we would expect the Crunchyroll deal to have been a bummer
for Funimation: they have a huge exclusive back-catalog, & making it available
on Crunchyroll probably substantially decreased subscriptions to their
service. On the other hand, subscriptions to their service were bound to drop
anyway: it stops making a lot of sense to pay somebody ten dollars a month
when it’s nigh-impossible to get a video to play through its duration on their
platform, and so most people are going to cancel their subscription as soon as
they notice they’ll never get ten dollars worth of value out of it. In other
words, the smart thing for Funimation to do is to drop its streaming platform
altogether & make all Funimation titles Crunchyroll exclusives in return for a
substantially higher royalty cut.

The one silver lining for this change is that it’s bound to be gradual:
distribution licensing deals normally have renewal periods attached, so we
should expect the only immediate effect to be the absence of new catalog
titles from Funimation appearing on Crunchyroll & a lower number of new
simulcasts available on all platforms for upcoming seasons. In the mean time,
catalog titles will slowly rotate out of other streaming services. Not being
privy to the actual details of the licensing deals, I would expect a lot of
these shows to remain available for years. At the very least, all of
Funimation’s catalog titles appear to still be available on Crunchyroll at the
time of this writing.

(This article is adapted from [an answer on Quora.](https://www.quora.com/How-
do-you-feel-about-Funimation-ending-their-partnership-with-CrunchyRoll-
pulling-out-of-VRV-and-competing-for-with-CrunchyRoll-for-exclusive-rights-to-
different-anime-series-going-forward/answer/John-Ohno))

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [October 28,
2018](https://medium.com/p/7d3f0364ebe4).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/on-funimations-recently-announced-
licensing-plan-change-7d3f0364ebe4)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.