Sony About To Acquire Crunchyroll For A Ton Of Money

The US anime-streaming site Crunchyroll may be acquired by Sony in the near future, according to a report by Nikkei. The price? $957 million--or 100 billion yen, depending on how you look at it.

Sony's popular movie and music studio Aniplex produces a variety of anime content, but uses overseas companies in order to distribute it. If this deal goes through, Sony would be cutting out the distributor middleman and gaining Crunchyroll's 70 million members from around the globe.

This isn't the first time Sony has made a major investment in anime. In 2017, Sony acquired Funimation and gained 1 million paying subscribers, mainly in the U.S. However, it came up against obstacles expanding this customer base. According to The Association of Japanese Animations, the global anime market in 2018 was worth about $21 billion, which has grown almost double in the last five years.

If this mega-deal goes through, Sony will own the two biggest global anime streaming services.

With the coronavirus keeping people at home, the demand for streaming services intensified in the past year. We're almost a year into Disney+, but 2020 also saw the launch of NBC's Peacock and the quick rise and fall of Quibi.