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Funimation recently announced that, due to its acquisition by Sony, they would be pulling all their shows from other streaming platforms — eliminating their groundbreaking Crunchyroll partnership deal (under which Funimation-licensed simulcasts would automatically be available on Crunchyroll & Funimation’s back catalog titles would periodically be added to Crunchyroll’s catalog).
While it’s unfortunate, this is also a return to the norm.
When Funimation started the Crunchyroll partnership only a year or two ago, it came totally out of left field — anime fans had already been spending years either dealing with the poor streaming support from Funimation exclusives, waiting for them to circulate onto Netflix just to have them playable, or simply ditching legal streaming altogether. We didn’t expect the Crunchyroll partnership to happen, and once it happened, we shouldn’t have expected it to last.
The more pressing issue is the Sony ownership: Sony is a frequent member of production committees, and often has a stake in shows that it isn’t producing by nature of owning UMG (and thus typically owning distribution rights for the soundtracks and drama discs). Sony might pressure the projects it has a stake in to favor Funimation for distribution — which, because Funimation’s streaming site is borderline unusable, ultimately means a whole lot more shows (and a lot of big shows — Sony owns Aniplex, for instance) being unavailable for legal streaming.
