The anime community did not take kindly to Sony's completion of the purchase of Crunchyroll in 2021 for $1.8 billion USD, as the Japanese company already owned Funimation. The merger was inevitable, and a few moments ago, it was confirmed that Funimation's days are numbered, but there are also a couple of bad pieces of news.
When will Funimation close?
Through a statement published on the official Funimation website, it was announced that on April 2, 2024, operations will come to an end, as a conclusive part of the merger with Crunchyroll. In case you didn't know, despite the purchase of these 2 anime streaming services, there was the option to subscribe to either one, but that is now a thing of the past since Sony is only interested in keeping Crunchyroll in operation by migrating some content from the service that will cease to function on the specified date.
According to the information, the unification, favorable in this case for Crunchyroll, will involve an increase in the subscription price for those users coming from Funimation: "Your Funimation subscription will automatically transfer to Crunchyroll. From now on, subscription fees will be reflected in the next billing cycle through Crunchyroll or the third-party access platform, following Crunchyroll's prices. To access Crunchyroll subscriptions, users must log in to Crunchyroll using the same credentials they used for Funimation."
According to the statement, Funimation users transitioning to Crunchyroll will have the opportunity to transfer their history and preferences. To do this, they must follow these steps:
Crunchyroll will not support Funimation's digital copies
Now, in case a different email is used for each account, both from Funimation and Crunchyroll, there will be no unification option. The user will be left only with the registration of the platform that will remain active, thus losing their history and preferences on the app that will end on April 2.
Finally, it was reported that users who have digital copies from the purchase of Blu-ray anime collections that had agreements with Funimation will lose support, so they will not be able to stream them on Crunchyroll: "We understand that you may have concerns about your digital copies from Funimation. These digital copies available on Funimation were only digital access to the content available on the purchased DVDs or Blu-rays. Please note that Crunchyroll currently does not support digital copies, meaning you will not be able to access those specific digital copies. However, we are continuously working to improve our content offerings and provide you with an exceptional anime streaming experience."
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