Cognition Dissemination: This Shouldn’t Be Allowed
Crunchyroll has made several moves since Sony acquired Funimation, and announced that both of the world’s most powerful anime streaming services around would merge to become Big Anime. The fusion seemed promising at the start, as all mergers appear to be as the promises upon promises are provided by corporations when plans are first drawn. The two fingers appeared to meet perfectly, but it slowly became clear that one pair was askew. This would be as raw a deal as every other merger in existence. After nearly two years, it’s still taking a long, long time for Funimation’s content to make its way to Crunchyroll, and it sure doesn’t appear that licensing issues are affecting most of them. The company originally promised to have most of the content on Crunchyroll after a year, meaning by March 2023. It’s February 2024, and several titles remain missing.
This is what makes the company’s newest move so baffling, yet also unsurprising. Crunchyroll and Sony have been slowly phasing out Funimation’s streaming service for a good while, and now that’s all coming to an end. Funimation, or what’s left of it, confirmed that the service is shutting down on April 2nd, 2024. All of its content will disappear with it in the vanishing. Existing Funimation subscribers will be transferred to Crunchyroll in specific regions; precisely how that will happen is another question.
But you’re seeing the problem here, right? There is still plenty of content still only available for streaming on Funimation. And I mean plenty. Just look at how long this list compiled by Fandom Post (and former AnimeonDVD — which I religiously read a solid two decades ago) owner Chris Beveridge is. Several popular titles still have yet to reach Crunchyroll, including the original Eureka Seven series and the first movie, Code Geass: Akito the Exiled, the Dragon Ball movie dubs, the Dragon Ball Super dub, Durarara!!, Outlaw Star, The Vision of Escaflowne series and movie, and too many more. This is all ridiculous, and as the page notes, there’s been no need to edit the list since July 2023 because nothing from Funimation’s archives has been added to Crunchyroll since then. All of that content will be gone.
What the hell are we even doing here? This shouldn’t be allowed. A company shouldn’t be able to disappear a service overnight and banish piles of content into the streaming abyss with the snap of a finger, free of a gauntlet. I asked that question at the beginning of the paragraph, but I know there’s nothing we can do to stop this or other streaming services from continuing to do the same. There are even larger grievous offenders out there — I’m looking at you HBO Max and David Zaslav at Warner Bros. Discovery. But Crunchyroll and Sony are about to place pretty damned high on this list. It’s possible Crunchyroll will start adding Funimation titles again to combat criticism, but that isn’t a given.
This especially applies when they’re about to raise the prices soon. The price for an annual subscription is set to nearly double, from $54.99 to $99.99, starting next year. There’s no telling whether monthly subscribers will get a price increase, but… come on. You know that’s going to happen, right? Consider this a warning.
It would be bad enough that the Funimation sunset is making a bunch of streaming content unavailable, but there will be a slightly larger victim: Digital Funimation titles. These were primarily digital copies of shows redeemed from DVD and Blu-ray sets that Funimation released, a good way to watch shows or movies on platforms that couldn’t take discs. Now, all of those will be disappearing alongside this sunsetting, and Crunchyroll as vowed to do jack shit about people losing content they owned on their accounts.
Really, that should be “owned.” It’s been established several times that no one really owns their digital content, that users are making extended rentals. Whether people keep their digitally-owned content, much of which they purchased themselves, is through the goodwill of the corporations that keep the services running. These faceless entities are not to be trusted, and no one’s demonstrated this as well as Sony recently. They were deterred from deleting the Discovery-related content from people’s PlayStation Network accounts back in December thanks to a deal being renewed at the last minute, but they apparently had to get their deranged digital deletion fix from somewhere. The victim just had to be anime.
Situations like this make the audience feel powerless to fight back. Crunchyroll and Sony should not be allowed to create another digital preservation issue, yet they are. They sure as hell won’t be the only ones; they haven’t been before, they aren’t now, and they won’t be in the future. The only ways to battle against this is to seriously own your content that can’t be taken away from you through physical media, or by taking to the vast high seas matey.
That is, until you realize that corporations also control the production of physical media, and are trying to turn the World Wide Web into even more of a soulless husk than it is now. The future sounds real bad.
About The Author
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
