One of the largest (if not the largest) anime-only streaming OTT platforms, Crunchyroll, is reportedly being sold to Sony for nearly 1 billion dollars. This American OTT streaming service has already entered the final stages of negotiation with the final total sum mentioned to be around 957 million dollars, or more than a 100 billion yen. Currently, Crunchyroll is owned by the US telecoms giant, AT&T.
Crunchyroll has an extensive library, which can be accessed around the globe for a relatively cheap price, while also offering the original manga (comics) for reading as well. Since Crunchyroll is one of the few big anime streaming platforms, Sony is planning to bulk up on original anime content – both in production as well as on acquiring.
With Hulu and Netflix being the major anime players on OTTs, this is Sony’s way of expanding their hold on “this side of the market”. Sony already owns the US anime distributor Funimation, which licenses a number of popular shows like Attack on Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist, and One Piece. So acquiring Crunchyroll would help it to extend its catalog even further, expanding its products offered in Japan and to the rest of the world, too. This acquisition will also give Sony instant access to 70 million new subscribers.
AT&T on the other hand, is trying to cover their outstanding debt of over 150 billion dollars by selling off this piece of “Entertainment Real-estate”. The initial asking price for the streaming platform was set at 1.5 billion dollars, but the price was too steep for Sony. Most of these reports have been given by Nikkei Asia.