The president of Crunchyroll, Rahul Purini, announced that the company is working to compensate customers who will lose their digital libraries in the upcoming Funimation / Crunchyroll merger on April 2nd.
Funimation’s solution for wiping out digital libraries could be good, if it works
Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini says the company is working with customers to provide an ‘appropriate value’ for titles that will be lost in April.
Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini says the company is working with customers to provide an ‘appropriate value’ for titles that will be lost in April.
The Verge
“[We] are working really hard directly with each [customer] to ensure that they have an appropriate value for what they got in the digital copy initially,” Purini tells Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel during this week’s Decoder podcast. “As people reach out to us through customer service, we are responding and handling each of those requests as they prefer.”
When asked what “appropriate value” meant, Purini said, “So it could be that they get access to a digital copy on any of the existing other services where they might be able to access it. It could be a discount access to our subscription service so they can get access to the same shows through our subscription service.”
These options haven’t been formally announced or detailed, and Purini went on to say that it was something Crunchyroll customers are currently taking advantage of. My attempts to secure the “appropriate value” for some digital copies have, so far, been unsuccessful.
The original Funimation offer allowed customers who purchased Funimation disks to redeem a code for a digital copy accessible via a digital rights locker similar to Movies Anywhere. In 2017, Sony acquired Funimation for $148 million. That purchase was followed by its $1.175 billion acquisition of Crunchyroll from AT&T, which was completed in 2021. With the two anime streaming services under one owner, consolidation was the next step.
The merger came with the news that the Funimation streaming service would be shutting down, taking users’ digital copy libraries with it despite Funimation’s website still promising digital copies would be available to stream “forever” (subject, of course, to a terms of use agreement that most folks don’t read).
Image: Funimation
When asked on Decoder why customers were going to lose their digital libraries, Purini had a clear answer: “As we look at usage of that and the number of people that were redeeming those and using them, it was just not a feature that was available in Crunchyroll and isn’t in our roadmap.”
He went on to assure Decoder listeners that Crunchyroll had a solution in place for customers losing their libraries.
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