The Migration to Crunchyroll Isn’t Going Smoothly
March 2022 was the start of the Incredible Anime Migration to Crunchyroll. The service had long been in competition with Funimation as the premiere anime service (with HIDIVE following behind), both services featuring their fair share of new anime combined with extensive catalogs of older works. When Sony, who’s owned Funimation since 2017, announced their intent to and subsequently complete the acquisition of Crunchyroll from AT&T in late 2021, it was easy to see what would happen. Streaming will be the focus in the future, and Crunchyroll is in several more territories compared to the largely America-focused Funimation. The bigger service was bound to, let’s say, Highlander the less popular one, and thus, Crunchyroll is slowly collecting Funimation’s noggin.
The merging of both services, with Funimation’s content going to Crunchyroll, seemed like it would be good on the surface. Instead of subscribing to two services, both with separate monthly charges (or two big annual ones), it would be much nicer to have all that on one service. The migration, however, has not all gone to plan. Unless both companies take steps to resolve the current issues largely of their own creation, this could end up being a raw deal for Funimation’s subscribers — beyond the potential of less competition resulting in fewer risks being taken down the line.
The migration of shows from Funimation to Crunchyroll has been slower than expected. The latter has been adding shows from the former in batches every Tuesday, and while they’ve included heavy hitters like the Dragon Ball shows and My Hero Academia, plenty of content has yet to reach the service. There were scattered reports that Crunchyroll was hoping to have around 80 percent of Funimation’s library on the service by the end of this month; unless a massive batch is added tomorrow, that’s unlikely to happen. Crunchyroll has been recommending that Funimation subscribers cancel their subscriptions since the start of March, but doing so is hasty if there remain shows exclusively in the latter’s library that users of both would still like to watch.
They should also keep those subscriptions because, for some bizarre reason, Crunchyroll has been adding censored TV versions of Funimation’s shows instead of the uncensored Blu-ray versions present on Funi’s service. The Crunchyroll version of Akudama Drive, for instance, contains edits for language and violence, enough to make anyone watching it feel like they’re receiving a raw deal. Time will tell if this will ever be addressed, assuming they didn’t intentionally add these.
The service also confirmed changes to the subscription plans that are unsurprisingly pissing off several users. Anyone with an ad-supported subscription will only be able to watch the first three episodes of shows premiering for the spring 2022 season until May 31st, instead of being able to watch episodes one week after the debuts. Crunchyroll has a lot of subscribers in the ad-supported tier, likely considerably more than those with premium subscriptions, so a sizable chunk of their userbase will be screwed unless they’re willing to pay. Well, those who won’t run right to piracy, a given among anime fans. This is precisely the kind of decision a service makes when they’ve successfully eliminated the biggest competition, and you can expect plenty more in the near future.
It’s even funnier, in a way, how this is happening when several library anime options will be removed at the month’s end. Among them are popular shows like Akame ga Kill!, Girls und Panzer, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Medaka Box, and No Game No Life. Notably, most of these titles, including the five examples listed in this paragraph, will remain available on HIDIVE. There’s still one competing anime streaming service you can go to watch them, assuming you own a device the app can be used on. HIDIVE is not available on PlayStation platforms (whether that’s because it would compete with Sony’s anime services is anyone’s guess), but it is available on Xbox and Roku.
In addition to these, more user interface changes should be made to the Crunchyroll app and website to make the options clearer. There are pages where it’s far more difficult than it should be to choose the right options, thanks to names either being too long or for the sheer seemingly never-ending number of options to wade through. It’s especially a problem for shows with multiple dubs in assorted languages, like Attack on Titan and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. There was plenty of deserved criticism for the Funimation website and app interfaces, but credit to them for at least making most playback options clear and concise. Who knows whether Funi’s UI designers will be employed by Crunchyroll once the Funimation name is successfully phased out.
Whether any issues will be fixed from here will depend on how aware Crunchyroll is of their status as the Big Anime Streaming Honcho. If they fully know this, as the changes to the subscription plans imply, they will take their goddamned time to implement any changes if they do so at all. In time, we might come to miss Funimation, as it’s unlikely that any kind of replacement will come along in the near future. We’ll see how much money AMC Networks is willing to pump into HIDIVE.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
