Crunchyroll Adds Additional Membership Tiers As Sony Purchase Rumors Begin To Circulate

Ahead of the incoming V-CRX event happening next week, news about the future of Crunchyroll is rolling in. Having just announced 3 million paying subscribers, the largest anime streaming service has announced the addition of two additional membership levels to go along with it’s premium plan which now goes for $8 a month and will soon be renamed “Fan”.

The other two plans, “Mega Fan” @ $10 and “Ultimate Fan” @ $15 according to Deadline, “Mega Fan” adds offline viewing, four concurrent streams (compared with just one on the Fan level), and rebates at the Crunchyroll Store. “Ultimate Fan” subscribers get six concurrent streams, an annual membership “swag bag,” and exclusive access to members-only merchandise. The free ad-supported model stays as is.

Crunchyroll has been a strong brand for WarnerMedia in a number of different ways both as a catalog of anime content for the just-released HBO MAX streaming service and with a slew of originals on the way for Adult Swim’s Toonami block which is slowly being re-branded as “Powered by Crunchyroll” in international markets where the streaming service continues to thrive. Furthermore, Toonami is teasing a bunch of new original series we don’t even know about yet coming next year so clearly somebody at WarnerMedia wants to continue investing in anime.

The Independent is reporting that Sony, already the parent company to competitor Funimation which has it’s own sordid past with Crunchyroll, is contemplating a purchase of the anime brand. Unfortunately, Warner Media’s asking price of $1.5 billion dollars wasn’t even in the ball park of the no more than $500,000,000 that Sony wants to spend, valuing $500 per subscriber.

Our Take

Sony’s right, Crunchyroll nowhere near has a value of $1.5 billion and I think WarnerMedia shopping Crunchyroll is a bad idea. If they want to reduce costs start by ending VRV, Rooster Teeth, Crunchyroll, etc and merge them into HBO MAX along with HBO NOW which is still ongoing. The future of streaming is giving people tier options for content they prefer on a single platform rather than fifty platforms that all cost about the same.