[Discussion] Sony's Funimation Now Owns Crunchyroll

[Uncrowned Guard]

Sony owned Funimation has acquired Crunchyroll for nearly $1.2 billion and has essentially taken ownership of the anime streaming service.  After weeks of rumors and speculation AT&T and WarnerMedia agreed to sell the service to Funimation.  Sony is not new to the anime world with multiple partnerships and establishing companies such as Aniplex back in 2005.  

The bigger question looms on the future of these services as competition is started to build in services like Netflix, but these "newcomers" have a very long way to go in the market.  Sony has already stated that some new series will have times exclusivity on their platforms but for me this not a huge bummer as most anime is exclusive to one of those two services anyway.  

There are many good perks to this acquisition as Sony has done the Aniplex service a lot of good and has used it to spread anime creation all over the globe.  Sony also a great team of studios to enhance Crunchyroll Original anime with resources that the platform likely saw as unobtainable before.  We could always bring up the fear that such a monopoly on anime could bring down the amount of shows and budgets as a whole, but Sony has not been a company to do this in a past and the gaming side of their company has certainly not hurt the industry and seems to be doing well overall for exclusives.

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