Crunchyroll, Sony, and the Consolidation of Anime Streaming

If you watched Jujutsu Kaisen on Crunchyroll in 2023, your subscription paid a Sony subsidiary to stream an anime that another Sony subsidiary (Aniplex) had co-financed, animated at a studio (MAPPA) that worked with the Aniplex production committee. That kind of vertical integration was not how the anime streaming business looked five years earlier. It is how it looks now.

The consolidation happened in two distinct moments — a 2021 acquisition and a 2022 brand merger — and the structural consequences for studios, fans, and competitors are still working themselves out. This is the map.

The 2021 acquisition

In March 2021, Sony Pictures Entertainment announced an agreement to acquire Crunchyroll from AT&T’s WarnerMedia subsidiary for approximately $1.175 billion. The deal closed in August 2021 after regulatory review.

The figure is publicly reported and is the most-cited number in coverage of the deal. The strategic logic was less about the price and more about what Crunchyroll added to Sony’s existing position. Crunchyroll, at acquisition, was the dominant anime-specific streaming platform in the West — a subscriber-funded service with the broadest simulcast library in English, and the largest catalog of licensed anime in subbed and dubbed form.

Sony already had significant anime exposure before buying Crunchyroll. The acquisition turned that exposure into something closer to control.

What Sony already owned

The pre-2021 Sony anime portfolio is worth laying out, because the Crunchyroll acquisition only makes sense in light of what it consolidated with.

Aniplex is the major one. Aniplex is a Japanese music and anime production company that has been a Sony Music Entertainment Japan subsidiary since 2001. Aniplex co-finances and sits on the production committees for many of the most commercially successful anime of the 2010s and 2020s — Demon Slayer, Fate/Stay Night and the broader Fate franchise, Sword Art Online, Kaguya-sama, and others. Aniplex doesn’t typically animate the shows itself, but it puts up money and takes IP-rights positions in exchange for distribution and merchandising rights.

A-1 Pictures is an anime studio owned by Aniplex, founded in 2005. A-1 has animated Sword Art Online, Solo Leveling, Kaguya-sama, and others. The Aniplex-A-1 relationship is essentially in-house: Aniplex funds, A-1 produces.

Funimation was a separate Sony acquisition. Sony Pictures Television bought Funimation in 2017. At the time, Funimation was the main anime dubbing and distribution operation in North America, with a streaming platform competitive with Crunchyroll and a strong theatrical distribution arm for anime films.

So at the moment Sony bought Crunchyroll in 2021, Sony already owned Aniplex (production financing), A-1 Pictures (a major animation studio), and Funimation (a competing streaming service to Crunchyroll). The acquisition wasn’t entering a new market — it was consolidating dominance in a market Sony already had a strong position in.

The 2022 brand merger

The structural problem after the Crunchyroll acquisition was that Sony now owned two competing anime streaming services in the West: Crunchyroll and Funimation. Subscribers could pay either company, both of them subsidiaries of the same parent.

The 2022 resolution was a brand merger. Funimation’s streaming catalog was migrated into Crunchyroll, the Funimation subscription product was wound down, and the consolidated platform operated under the Crunchyroll brand globally. Funimation continued to exist as a theatrical distribution and home video brand for some time, but the streaming service itself was subsumed.

The result was that, by late 2022, Sony had a single consolidated anime streaming platform — Crunchyroll — operating in most major non-China markets, with a content catalog combining what had been the two largest English-language anime libraries.

The vertical integration map

What the consolidation produced is a structure where one corporate parent — Sony — has stakes at multiple levels of the anime value chain:

Production financing: Aniplex co-finances anime through production committees.
Animation studios: A-1 Pictures (and other studios Aniplex partners with) produce the shows.
Music: Sony Music Entertainment Japan and various subsidiaries handle anime music publishing for many Aniplex-financed titles.
Streaming distribution: Crunchyroll streams the finished shows globally.
Theatrical distribution: Crunchyroll, alongside Sony Pictures’ theatrical arm, distributes anime films in Western markets. Sony Pictures handled significant rights for the Demon Slayer film slate.
Merchandising and licensing: Aniplex and adjacent Sony subsidiaries handle character licensing and merchandising for the IPs they co-own.

Not every Sony-streamed anime is a Sony-financed anime — Crunchyroll licenses widely from other production committees too. But for the subset of titles where Aniplex is on the production committee, Sony has a position at almost every layer of how the show reaches an audience and how money flows back from it.

This is what “vertical integration” means in this context. It is not a unique structure in media — Disney has similar end-to-end positions in its own franchises — but it is new in anime, where the historical norm was a fragmented landscape of production committees, regional licensors, and competing streamers.

Subscriber growth and pricing strategy

Sony has reported Crunchyroll subscriber figures in public communications. The headline figure cited in early 2024 announcements was “over 13 million paying subscribers.” More recent figures continue to show growth, though the precise current number is something to verify against current company disclosures rather than estimated.

The pricing strategy under Sony ownership has trended in a few visible directions:

Gradual price increases, with the standard monthly tier moving upward over the post-acquisition years. This is consistent with most streaming services in the same period.
Premium tier emphasis, with higher-priced tiers (“Mega Fan,” “Ultimate Fan” in some markets) offering benefits beyond ad-free streaming, including merchandise discounts and event access.
PlayStation integration, with PlayStation Plus subscribers in some markets receiving Crunchyroll bundle offers. This leverages Sony’s gaming subsidiary as a customer-acquisition channel.

The pricing direction is broadly what you would expect from a streaming service whose parent company has a portfolio of services to cross-sell against. It is also what subscribers complain about — Crunchyroll’s price has risen meaningfully since the Sony acquisition, and the perception of value has become more contested.

What isn’t under Sony

Listing what Sony doesn’t control is also worth doing, because the consolidation isn’t total.

Netflix continues to license anime, co-produce anime originals, and operate as a major distributor independent of Sony. Netflix’s anime strategy is focused on a smaller set of high-profile titles with global theatrical and streaming windows — Devilman Crybaby, Aggretsuko, the Castlevania franchise, the various Tomihiko Morimi adaptations — and on simulcast licenses for select seasonal titles.

Disney+ has not made a serious anime play in Western markets, despite owning Hulu (which has some anime catalog) and despite Disney’s broader animation strategy. The reasons are likely strategic — Disney’s animation positioning is in-house Disney Animation and Pixar — rather than incapacity.

Bilibili and the Chinese anime ecosystem operate largely outside the Sony-Crunchyroll consolidation. China has its own licensing, distribution, and production ecosystem with different structural rules.

Independent licensors and streamers continue to exist for smaller catalogs. HIDIVE, owned by AMC Networks, maintains a niche position with select catalog and simulcast titles. Various small streamers and free ad-supported platforms (FAST channels) carry anime in various markets.

So Sony does not own everything. But for the dominant subscription anime streaming experience in most Western markets, Sony’s Crunchyroll is the central platform.

What consolidation means for studios

The consequences of this consolidation for anime studios are mixed and worth being clear about.

For Aniplex-affiliated productions, the consolidated Crunchyroll distribution channel is a structural advantage. A show with Aniplex on the production committee gets reliable global streaming distribution through a platform that is incentivized to promote it.

For non-Aniplex productions, the situation is more complicated. Crunchyroll still licenses widely — production committees not involving Aniplex still get Crunchyroll deals — but the negotiating dynamics are different when the distributor and one major competitor in financing are the same corporate parent.

For animation studios, the structural pressure on production conditions hasn’t been alleviated by the consolidation. The MAPPA labor issues, the broader industry conversation about animator pay, the schedule-compression problems that produce visibly rushed episodes — these continue. The consolidation has changed who profits from anime, not how anime gets made.

For independent and non-Japanese production, the consolidation is one more structural reason for non-Japanese animation studios (Korean, Chinese, increasingly American animation operations targeting anime aesthetics) to develop independently. The Sony-Crunchyroll consolidation locks up a specific distribution channel for a specific kind of anime; everything outside that has to find different distribution routes.

What to watch in the late 2020s

The structural questions for the next few years are open. Does Crunchyroll continue to grow subscriber count, or does it plateau? Does antitrust attention from Japanese or Western regulators intensify around the Sony vertical integration? Does a competitor — Netflix, a hypothetical new entrant — make a meaningful play to dislodge Crunchyroll’s central position in licensed simulcast anime?

The 2021-2022 consolidation is the structural fact of contemporary anime streaming. The next phase of the industry will play out within or against that structure. The Otakira encyclopedia tracks distribution and licensing context where it shapes how anime reaches international audiences; the browse page surfaces production and committee information where it’s verifiable.

Understanding the consolidation is part of understanding what you’re paying for when you subscribe, and what flows back to whom when you watch.