Sony has announced that it will be adding Crunchyroll, the US-based anime streaming service, to its portfolio. The Japanese conglomerate says that it will be taking the company off the hands of its current owner, AT&T, to the sum of US$1.175 billion (~RM4.77 billion).
The acquisition marks the second company Sony has added an anime-focused streaming service into its ranks, the first company being Funimation. Unlike Crunchyroll, however, Funimation’s focus was more towards dubbing anime, on top of releasing them.
Needless to say, the ownership of both Crunchyroll and Funimation now effectively give Sony an even greater amount of control and power over anime within the US. In practice, it’s a smart move by the company, especially at a time when other media companies struggle to figure out how to deal with the medium. Case in point, the online streaming service, Netflix, has been investing a lot of time and money into the production and licensing of its own anime content.
