The End of Funimation?
Well, the big news is that a large chunk of Funimation's library has been transferred over to Crunchyroll. That was not something that I was expecting to be honest. I knew that Sony had bought out Crunchyroll, but I figured they would do the early Crunchyroll/Funimation alliance days where Funimation would more or less go exclusively dubs, and Crunchyroll would get pretty much exclusively subs. However, that does not seem to be the case. By the time this has been written, I think 50 titles will be moved over to Crunchyroll. Not just subs but dubs as well. Maybe this is the end of Funimation?
One has to wonder about this. This relationship does not appear to be cooperative, and I think the majority of the titles that had stuff moved over were big selling points for Funimation. Take My Hero Academia, for example. That one could only be seen in English dubs on Funimation, but now all five seasons have been moved over, which is strange. This makes me wonder, to be honest, what will become of Funimation. This seems to be a pretty big sign that Funimation will get out of the streaming gig.
I guess that is not the end of the world for that to happen, but still, that is pretty big news. I am guessing that chances are slowly over the course of the following year. Streaming will be faded out from Funimation and put on Crunchyroll. Then, I think that the DVD/Blu-ray sales will be moved over to exclusively Funimation. Crunchyroll does not seem to have much in the way of a method for selling anime. Crunchyroll is pretty good at selling random crap, but that can be outsourced, and I have no idea if Crunchyroll is really selling anything or if they are just passing along the good news to the people who are actually doing the selling for a small cut. I guess time will tell the question is if this is, in fact, the end of Funimation streaming, then is that a good thing.
I am going to say, maybe. I cannot say for sure if that will be a good thing, but I know that it will not be the worst thing in the world if I have one less streaming site to go to. I know that HiDive and Crunchyroll are on VRV, at least I think they are, so I think this might be a plan to improve that brand while trying to centralize all the anime in one spot. Which might be bad for anime in the long run. I have a hard time deciding if I want this to happen or not. Once companies start to get big and monopolistic, their quality tends to fade. So I guess I just want to be sure that Crunchyroll will not get lazy. Then again, I think that is not a big deal.
If the steaming industry suffers, there will still be fansubs. This is not the first time we have had the industry get too big and then start doing stupid stuff and then failing. We will just go back to the old days and wait for the next group to appear. That is how Crunchyroll became a thing. At first, it was just a pirate site, then they went legitimate, and now we have a legitimate streaming industry. I still cannot help but wonder what will happen to these sites. It does not seem like a good idea to keep two major brands like that around. At the same time, there is no reason to not have them focus on one thing or another.
Either way, this is a pretty big thing in the world of anime. There are not many times when this stuff happens. I guess we will just have to see if this will be the moment to remember, just like the moment when ADV started doing its evil corporation stuff. Either way, I will try to be more optimistic about this stuff. I will also pretend like Sony is not censorship. My debauchery bad crazy, and I hope they will learn from their past mistakes and continue trucking along. Well, I guess worst comes to worst, I same $140 a year or whatever these sites are costing me now.