Sony announced that it would merge Funimation and Crunchyroll after acquiring the latter service in 2021. But the merger didn’t begin until 2022, and Funimation has continued to operate as a standalone service with a regular flow of new content. Presumably, prior licensing agreements and a technically difficult merging process kept Funimation on life support. But the grace period has ended, and Funimation is now alerting customers of the April 2nd shutdown.
“Please note that Crunchyroll does not currently support Funimation Digital copies, which means that access to previously available digital copies will not be supported. However, we are continuously working to enhance our content offerings and provide you with an exceptional anime streaming experience. We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to explore the extensive anime library available on Crunchyroll.”
This merger also marks the end of Funimation’s “digital copies” system. In the past, Funimation members could redeem digital copies of associated DVDs or Blu-ray discs. A four-year-oldFunimation supoprt pagesays that digital copies are available “forever,” but a newend of service pagestates that “previously available digital copies will not be supported” on Crunchyroll.
It’s a stark reminder that “digital ownership” isn’t real ownership. The digital copies system was very generous—it was a nice perk for people who purchased anime on DVD and Blu-ray. But the “forever” policy may have encouraged customers to buy physical mediaandcommit to the Funimation service. Those who spentextramoney because of this policy are understandably upset.
This is just the latest example of digital ownership’s downsides. Last year, PlayStation announced that it would remove all Discovery-owned content purchases from users' libraries. PlayStationreversed the decisionafter forming a new licensing agreement with Discovery.
All Funimation accounts will be automatically transferred to Crunchyroll on April 2nd. In any case, you should manually transfer your account before the cutoff date. Simply log into Crunchyroll using your Funimation credentials. Existing Crunchyroll accounts can also be merged with Funimation accounts, but only if both accounts are associated with the same email address. You’ll need tocontact Crunchyrollif your two accounts use different emails.
