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Murderer of demons
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We now have a situation that encompasses how consolidation in the media space is bad, especially when combined with the concept of digital ownership over physical one.
Sony-owned Crunchyroll has been absorbing its former rival Funimation for a while now in various ways, but when it officially closes on April 2, customers who purchased content on Funimation will not see it transfer to Crunchyroll. Then those purchases are simply lost.
“We understand that you may have concerns about your Funimation digital copies,” said the blog post readings. “Please note that Crunchyroll does not currently support digital copies from Funimation, meaning access to previously available digital copies will not be supported. However, we are continually working to improve our content offerings and provide you with an exceptional anime streaming experience. “We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to explore the extensive anime library available on Crunchyroll.”
After the “however” I thought they were going to say they were working on a future solution, but no. The answer is “just use Crunchyroll and start over with our ‘exceptional anime streaming service’.” No solutions, no apparent attempt in solutions, from what we can see here. While you can merge accounts, that purchased library just… disappeared.
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If that wasn’t surprising enough, the annual price of the service now goes up to $100 a year, so you’re paying for the privilege of losing all that content. They cite things like “operating costs,” “improving service,” and, interestingly, “competition,” after merging and eliminating their biggest rival in the space.
“There are many other websites that show anime, so Crunchyroll has to compete with them,” the blog says, “This means spending money on advertising and making sure they have enough good shows to attract users.”
Incredible. And this is particularly relevant in the face of the idea that Microsoft could abandon the console war one way or another soon enough and leave Sony as the last one standing in that conflict. And if they’re doing this with anime, what else will they do it with when they get the chance?
The answer to all this seems to be “don’t buy digital media.” That’s at least to some extent possible for movies and TV now, as you simply stream them and recognize that you never actually own anything. Or buy a dwindling supply of Blu-rays. Those answers aren’t good, but they’re better than spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on an ecosystem that could disappear at any moment. This isn’t so easy to do in, say, the world of video games, where digital libraries are almost mandatory and many new consoles won’t have a disc drive at all.
I’ve seen bad results with consolidation and bad things happen with digital libraries, but this is one of the worst examples I’ve seen of the two combining in the entertainment space. Absolutely inexcusable on Sony and Crunchyroll’s part here.
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