Nikkei Asia reports Sony nears finalization of Crunchyroll acquisition

[Jman]

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2020-10-30/nikkei-sony-nears-acquisition-of-crunchyroll/.164843

Why is this in the Toonami thread?  Well because a lot of Toonami’s upcoming originals are Crunchyroll collaborations.  If CR falls into Sony’s hands, and becomes the distribution arm replacing FUNiNow, you could see most of those originals vanish into thin freaking air.  Not to mention such a move would cause Sony and Netflix to essentially become the two major players for anime in the US, leaving Toonami whatever scraps are left as the remaining notable distributors (Viz, Sentai, and Right Stuff) ally with one of the two respective power players in an attempt to keep themselves in business.  

This could fundamentally change the balance of power in a rapidly growing sector of the streaming market, and Toonami is the most likely to be left in the cold.

[PokeNirvash]

Seems kind of extreme that they'd be that exclusive about it, but as with most thinks, I'll just wait until it happens to see how things actually pan out.

[The1gairon]

... why would SONY ditch Funimation?

[Jman]

Just now, elfie said:

... why would SONY ditch Funimation?

They wouldn’t.  They would however, ditch FUNiNow as an app in favor of using the Crunchyroll brand and infrastructure for all their anime streaming.  

[Blatch]

I would hope they'd at least let everything in production finish and air on Toonami before walling off their originals. But yeah, this is pretty concerning. I especially feel for Sentai, seeing as how they're going from getting a piece of the Crunchyroll pie via releasing their dubs to seemingly getting snuffed out by Funi again.

[MasqueradeOverture]

38 minutes ago, Blatch said:

I would hope they'd at least let everything in production finish and air on Toonami before walling off their originals. But yeah, this is pretty concerning. I especially feel for Sentai, seeing as how they're going from getting a piece of the Crunchyroll pie via releasing their dubs to seemingly getting snuffed out by Funi again.

The ClarkMan said this wouldn't effect anything in production right now, so...

Grandfathered in I guess?

Edited October 30, 2020 by MasqueradeOverture

[Sketch]

9 hours ago, Jman said:

They wouldn’t.  They would however, ditch FUNiNow as an app in favor of using the Crunchyroll brand and infrastructure for all their anime streaming.  

WE CAN HOPE.

If we end up with CR's licenses getting pushed exclusively to FUNimation's apps, it's gonna suck real bad. Also if this leads to CR's international licenses in non-North American territories being underutilized, a whole lot of people in other regions will have even more reasons to justify piracy.

[EmpressAngel]

I mean, there are contracts in place for Toonami to air these shows. I doubt Sony's going to want to fork over more money to buy out those contracts now that the shows are so far into production, especially if they're really paying damn near a billion dollars for Crunchyroll already.

[Jman]

3 hours ago, Sketch said:

WE CAN HOPE.

If we end up with CR's licenses getting pushed exclusively to FUNimation's apps, it's gonna suck real bad. Also if this leads to CR's international licenses in non-North American territories being underutilized, a whole lot of people in other regions will have even more reasons to justify piracy.

If you buy Crunchyroll, it’s presumably for infrastructure and licenses.  No sense throwing the former out.  That’s my hope anyway.

[ben0119]

Yeah one would hope the co-productions with Crunchyroll can still go through.  Those contracts still have to be honored, right, or do they go up in smoke when the company is bought out?  I'm not sure how this stuff works.

If Sony owns both Funimation and Crunchyroll, then yeah, their streaming services would be redundant, right?  They wouldn't keep running both of them separately, would they?  But why would they get rid of the Funimation one instead of the Crunchyroll one?

Toonami already has a good relationship with Funimation and Aniplex, who are both owned by Sony, so there is that.

Here is Demarco's Twitter post and thread on this.  I'll have to dig through it more later.

 

Edited November 1, 2020 by ben0119

[Jman]

 

It’s official.

[The1gairon]

....

[PokeNirvash]

[Daos]

Looky what just popped up on my Ameritrade account.

Sony Corp (NYSE: SNE) has inked a deal to buy AT&T Inc’s (NYSE: T) anime video streaming subsidiary Crunchyroll for $1.175 billion in cash consideration. A definite agreement has been signed by Sony Funimation Global Group LLC to acquire a 100% stake in AT&T’s Ellation Holdings.

 

Edited December 10, 2020 by Daos

[Sketch]

So it’s for the entirety of Ellation? Then VRV is most likely included.

[Jman]

9 hours ago, Sketch said:

So it’s for the entirety of Ellation? Then VRV is most likely included.

That also means CR’s original line is mostly dead in the water.  FUNi doesn’t need Webtoons in bulk or lame Avatar clones.

[Sketch]

17 hours ago, Jman said:

That also means CR’s original line is mostly dead in the water.  FUNi doesn’t need Webtoons in bulk or lame Avatar clones.

Crackle could use some new stuff

[ben0119]

I don't like all this corporate gobbling and consolidation.  I was pretty worried when Sony bought Funimation, though nothing bad seemed to have happened from that. 

But now that Sony owns both of them it's limited competition and has control of most of the anime localization in America.  I guess if the government gave a crap or paid attention to anime, this might be considered monopolistic behavior. 

This also means there are some redundancies.  Some people might lose their jobs.  And some projects might be dropped.  I wonder if the Toonami-Crunchy co-pros are still going to happen.  I know Demarco said it shouldn't be an issue, but still.

Another thing is anime licenses can be majorly convoluted at times.  Some shows are stuck in legal limbo due to various shenanigans that have gone on over the years.  And deals can be touchy.  I hope we don't lose access to any shows because of this.

[Sketch]

45 minutes ago, ben0119 said:

I don't like all this corporate gobbling and consolidation.  I was pretty worried when Sony bought Funimation, though nothing bad seemed to have happened from that. 

But now that Sony owns both of them it's limited competition and has control of most of the anime localization in America.  I guess if the government gave a crap or paid attention to anime, this might be considered monopolistic behavior. 

This also means there are some redundancies.  Some people might lose their jobs.  And some projects might be dropped.  I wonder if the Toonami-Crunchy co-pros are still going to happen.  I know Demarco said it shouldn't be an issue, but still.

Another thing is anime licenses can be majorly convoluted at times.  Some shows are stuck in legal limbo due to various shenanigans that have gone on over the years.  And deals can be touchy.  I hope we don't lose access to any shows because of this.

Those 4 co-productions are in iron-clad contracts regardless of who owns Crunchyroll. And Adult Swim has a fine relationship with SONY and FUNimation regardless.

[ben0119]

13 minutes ago, Sketch said:

Those 4 co-productions are in iron-clad contracts regardless of who owns Crunchyroll. And Adult Swim has a fine relationship with SONY and FUNimation regardless.

Well that is good to know.

But when I talked about losing access to shows I didn't mean on Toonami.  We could lose access to shows, period, on any platform.  But I hope nothing like that happens.

[Jman]

It’s a big question the interest Sony has in production committee work.  I’m pretty sure that they don’t want to make anything like Dumbass Aztec Avatar Clone again, but more Shield Hero and the like?  Maximizing the production of a Shounen Jump animation to film pipeline (presumably Sony films gets first dibs on distributing the Naruto and MHA movies if they ever come out)?  Definite interesting questions.