The Peaches and Herb song “Reunited” would probably be the appropriate soundtrack to the reports that AT&T’s WarnerMedia is in talks to sell its anime-focused streaming service Crunchyroll to Sony.
The lyrics “reunited and it feels so good” describe a deal that could rekindle a partnership between WarnerMedia-owned Crunchyroll and Sony-owned Funimation that ended in 2018, if it weren't for that awkward $1.5 billion dollar asking price. According to a report in The Information, a deal was in the works but Sony balked at paying that much for a niche streaming service.
The prospect of once again having a unified library of anime streaming online is what makes this deal one to sit up and take notice of. It happened once back in 2016 when Funimation made a cross-licensing deal with Crunchyroll. The deal gave Crunchyroll rights to some of Funimation’s exclusively licensed shows and Funimation the home video distribution rights to Crunchyroll’s catalog of streaming anime. What this meant for fans was nearly all the anime titles both past and present were on one convenient streaming service. This harmony would not last when it came time to renew that deal in 2018.
The breakup between Funimation and Crunchyroll happened mostly due to AT&T's buyout of WarnerMedia, which led to a conflict with Sony-owned Funimation. The end of that deal led to an ongoing bidding war between the two companies for the rights to licensed anime and the ability to showcase new titles to their own streaming services as part of their lineup of anime every season. For fans, this meant another split in an already fractured landscape when it came to finding their favorite shows. Watching all the anime simulcasted between Japan and the west each season meant paying for both Funimation and Crunchyroll plus the titles released exclusively to Netflix, Amazon Prime or even Hulu.
This arms race between these two streaming competitors intensified over the years with each side leveraging the assets available to them to acquire new titles or bolster the other streaming platforms under their parent companies. For Crunchyroll, who seemed to lose out the most the breakup, it meant a cross-licensing agreement with HiDive (a streaming service for studio Sentai Filmworks entire library of shows), a major deal to acquire Viz Media Europe and a deal with Korea-based comic company Webtoons to turn several of their titles into anime. WarnerMedia also used Crunchyroll to bolster the library of anime available to HBOMax customers and strengthen the Cartoon Network Adult Swim lineup with new titles and ones from its own library. Funimation in return has consistently built a line up of simulcast anime exclusive to its own streaming platform that it used to share with Crunchyroll and used them to bolster Hulu, which it signed a multi-year deal with in 2017.
Even in the event of an acquisition, the idea of a unified library of anime available for streaming customers would not be certain. In the meantime though, the streaming wars between these two companies will continue.
Source: The Information