Crunchyroll to compensate Funimation users for digital home video purchases

Modified Feb 28, 2024 01:05 GMT

Tuesday, February 27, 2024, saw Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini reveal in an interview that the company intends to compensate Funimation users migrating to their service with “an appropriate value” for their digital home video purchases. With the Funimation platform shutting down in April 2024, users will lose their digital home video purchases since Crunchyroll doesn’t support them.

While Crunchyroll has specified their intent to compensate media holders in some way, exactly how they will be compensated has not been made clear at the time of this article’s writing. Funimation originally provided these digital home media purchases as part of some home video DVD or Blu-ray Disc purchases.

The Funimation service will officially shut down on April 2, 2024, as a part of the ongoing content and service consolidation efforts from Funimation to Crunchyroll following the merging of the two companies. Each current Funimation subscriber can choose to migrate their existing account, which would include their watch history and queue, or merge their Funimation account with a pre-existing one on the other service (if they use the same email address).

Crunchyroll remains ambiguous on exactly how Funimation users will be compensated for loss of home media

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As mentioned above, the consolidation of content and services from Funimation to Crunchyroll is a result of Sony’s Funimation Group acquiring the latter service from AT&T in August 2021. The purchase price of $1.175 billion was finalized and paid in cash at closing in 2021, marking well over two years since the initial news of the eventual consolidation was confirmed. The acquisition was first announced in December 2020.

Likewise, content has been moved off of Funimation since the Spring 2022 anime season, with more and more series slowly becoming exclusively available on the other platform. However, there still remains Funimation content to be transferred over at the time of this article’s writing, according to other unverified sources, such as a frequently updated list from The Fandom Post editor-in-chief Chris Beveridge that tracks this information.

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While Purini claimed that Crunchyroll is actively working to offer migrating users the aforementioned compensation, some fans have claimed this is not the case currently. Many have shared their experience of receiving a generic email apology rather than any compensation when testing the migration with a free Funimation account that has digital home video purchases on it. Those who have received compensation are also displeased with what they've been offered.

As a result, it’s unclear when Funimation users can expect this compensation from Purini’s company. However, with Funimation’s April 2, 2024 shutdown date fast approaching, fans can expect these details to be ironed out, announced, and implemented sometime in the coming weeks as the shutdown approaches.