UK Anime Distributor Crunchyroll/Funimation/Manga UK Discussion Thread

bakura said:
I'm just amazed it's on cbbc at all. Obviously I haven't watched it in years but I never imagined they would want a show like that even when censored. citv maybe but cbbc turned down sesame street because they didn't think it was a good show for education and now they've got a show that years ago they wouldn't have put on because as a public broadcaster they would have been scared of parents complaining about the violence and would have much rather left that to the public sector.

Still in will be funny seeing young kids watch this ask there parents for the dvd/blu-ray only for the parents to find there to young for it.

What am I saying kids don't watch discs anymore.
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I seem to remember Sesame Street aired on Channel 4 in the UK when I was a kid? (I'm 33 now so this would have been in the 90s). I could be mistaken though.
 
Well this is a surprise. When an email came through saying that Crunchyroll subscription prices are changing, my immediate thought was, "Here comes the inevitable price hike to reinforce their infrastructure now their servers are getting battered by the influx of Funimation users."

But no, it's a price decrease. They've only mentioned changes to monthly plans, so I don't know if there's any impact to annual subscriptions. The annual rate was a bargain compared to some streaming services already though, so I'm not bothered as long as it isn't going up. I actually wouldn't mind paying a little more if it meant they would straighten out the bandwidth problems a lot of us have been encountering recently.

www.crunchyroll.com

Crunchyroll Reducing Monthly Prices in Nearly 100 Countries & Territories

Big news! Crunchyroll is delighted to announce that, as of today, we’re reducing the cost of Crunchyroll Premium memberships in nearly 100 international territories. Here are some
www.crunchyroll.com www.crunchyroll.com
 
I'm curious as to the thinking behind the strategy here. They've just absorbed their only real competition in anime streaming (sorry, HiDive), and Netflix's tiny anime catalogue surely can't be drawing people away.

Maybe it's a response to increased prices on other mainstream streaming platforms and economic inflation in general, in an attempt to avoid getting dropped by people who can now afford fewer simultaneous streaming subscriptions.

Or maybe it's an attempt to convert more free users into subscribers. If it's the latter, the cynical side of me says this could be a prelude to more current season content being paywalled.
 
So does this mean annual subs will get a partial refund? If not that's going to be well ****/unfair, I only signed up 2 months ago!

I got the email too but I'm an annual member so no idea what it means for me
 
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AHA-Lambda said:
So does this mean annual subs will get a partial refund? If not that's going to be well ****/unfair, I only signed up 2 months ago!

I got the email too but I'm an annual member so no idea what it means for me
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Doubt it. It states the price reduction will come into effect on your next billing cycle.

Good to see the price come down in the UK as it had become vastly overpriced. Ireland is not receiving a price reduction at this time, but still remains cheaper than the new UK prices at €4.99/€6.49 for monthly subs and €39.99/€64.99 for yearly subs.
 
Dai said:
I'm curious as to the thinking behind the strategy here. They've just absorbed their only real competition in anime streaming (sorry, HiDive), and Netflix's tiny anime catalogue surely can't be drawing people away.

Maybe it's a response to increased prices on other mainstream streaming platforms and economic inflation in general, in an attempt to avoid getting dropped by people who can now afford fewer simultaneous streaming subscriptions.

Or maybe it's an attempt to convert more free users into subscribers. If it's the latter, the cynical side of me says this could be a prelude to more current season content being paywalled.
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It's a strange tactic indeed. May be they didn't get as many crossover subs from Funimation as they expected but the cynical part of me thinks this is just the groundwork for something else 🤔
Like how Netflix have said they'll start doing ads even on paid subs.
 
Jon O Fun said:
May be they didn't get as many crossover subs from Funimation as they expected
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This would make sense. I recall the rhetoric at the time of the merger announcement showing a surprising expectation that people would just flood to wherever the current season was streaming. There was that eyebrow-raising statement that people should go ahead and cancel their Funi subs as soon as the spring season started, for example.

While CR have been steadily adding Funi's back catalogue, it's been a slow process, and looks likely to take a year or two to complete at this rate (less than half of my Funi watchlist has been migrated). Maybe they underestimated how much subscribers value the back catalogue, at least in terms of retaining access even if viewing figures maybe wouldn't suggest they're a priority for people.
 
Funimation was also always £4.99, so that was never gonna help migration when crunchy roll costed more. So maybe there thinking is make it the same price to get everyone to transfer over, although as Dai mentioned if there still doing a fair bit of back catalogue I'm sure that'll put some people off switching straight away with the new price change.
 
I will say that I feel that the whole CR, Funi merger was handled extremely quickly and seem very forced. I thought that they would slowly phase out Funimation streaming and keep the Funimation brand for home video and I thought that before they would try and push everyone to move over to CR they would of sorted all tehcnical, account integration and added all the Funi content and not do it in chunks over time.

There is a lot of things that hadn't even been implement yet like cross account access, watch history between sites and digital copies (I do fear they are just going to do away with these all together since they no longer include them in home video anymore). Its just surprising that they didn't take their time with it and make switching over a lot more smoother.
 
I've held on to my Funi subscription because there is a lot of titles there I still watch that aren't over on Crunchy yet. So I've got Funi, Crunchy, HiDive, and Netflix subscriptions right now. My mom and my daughters mainly watch Netflix though; the last anime on there I watched was the Violet Evergarden Movie and Evangelion.
 
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bakura said:
What I also wonder from this is will crunchyroll reverse there decision to stop letting episodes be free a week later for non subscribers? They would only reverse that if it was hurting them and it might if they already reversed the subscription price.
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Thought they'd already done that last season. A few select series had the first episode for free for a few weeks after broadcast and the everything was locked down.
 
Given they had a choice of either making their service usable and justifying the existing cost, or leaving the service as-is with constant buffering and lowering the price so it's cheap enough we tolerate it, I'm not sure if this is the right decision.
 
Those LE prices lol

*Oh they've added discounts from RRP so they're not as high as they were when I first looked. Still expensive though.
 
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