Japanese multinational Sony is set to acquire Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll is the US-based anime streaming service. The deal is likely to be finalized for USD 1 billion. The negotiations are in the final stage. Once the deal is sealed, Sony will be in a position to access Crunchyroll’s more than 1,000 titles and 30,000 episodes. Founded in 2006, Crunchyroll is owned by the American telecommunication company AT&T. The company had been looking to offload Crunchyroll for some time. Both Sony and AT&T are yet to make any official announcement regarding the deal. The acquisition will see Sonya gaining 70 million members. It will also give a boost to Sony in entering a global fight with platforms like Netflix. The platform has seen some brilliant Anime content in the past few months.
The company has already reported a mega-success with the release of the animated Demon Slayer movie. The movie has become the highest-grossing movie in the east Asian country. The Japanese multinational already owns anime service Funimation. It has nearly one million subscribers. Sony acquired Funimation in 2017. The latest deal will help Sony to further expand its offering in the country and abroad as well. Crunchyroll has 70 million free members and three million subscribers who pay. They are spread in nearly 200 countries. The global anime market has been growing over the last few years. In 2018, the market stood at USD 21 billion. This was at least one-and-a-half times that of five years earlier.
Anime has its origin in Japan. It is hand-drawn and computer animation. The word is derived from the animation. The pandemic has forced the people to stay inside their homes and explore video distribution services to entertain themselves. This has helped the streaming services gaining huge subscribes around the world and also making the competition tough. Notably, the largest streamer Netflix is also holding talks with animation studios to add more content to expand its base. It has already several anime contents in the past few months. In 2019, Disney launched its own streaming service.
