After a few months of behind-the-scenes boardroom meetings and dealings, Sony Picture announced their acquisition of Crunchyroll on multiple social media accounts yesterday. Sony Pictures bought the world-wide anime streaming service from AT&T for 1.175 billion USD. At this point, the currently Sony Pictures owned streaming service has just over three million subscribers.
Sony already owned the anime streaming service Funimation which already had the licenses for many popular shows such as Attack on Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist, and One Piece. Now that Sony has acquired both Funimation and Crunchyroll, the company has a ridiculous hold on the “anime sector” of viewing content in the US, while other media companies are still trying to figure out how to roll out their anime content. Netflix has been investing heavily in creating and licensing anime content on their own and at the moment are their only real competition (both in the US and Internationally). Crunchyroll is also an “in” for Sony Pictures to target the Indian anime lovers as well.
With the acquisition of Crunchyroll, Sony Pictures instantly gets 90 million registered users and 50 million followers from multiple social media platforms which will help them cement their foothold in the anime streaming section. Joanne Waage, the general manager of Crunchyroll expressed her excitement for the new takeover. Combining the strength of the Crunchyroll brand along with the expertise of the global team of Sony’s Funimation will yield big results in the global market, according to Waage.
AT&T has been going around trying to sell Crunchyroll for months, and Sony has been negotiating the price for the streaming service- the moment it was available in the market. The telecom monolith has been trying to sell Crunchyroll so as to cover their outstanding debt of over 150 billion USD. AT&T had priced the service at 1.5 billion USD, while Sony Pictures had it valued somewhere closer to 1 billion USD. Eventually after much deliberations and discussions, both parties agreed to an amount just under 1.2 billion USD.