Crunchyroll, WarnerMedia’s anime-focused streaming service, has added two additional tiers of premium membership for its subscribers, which adds several new features to the base Crunchyroll experience. This includes the option for offline viewing; access to several more concurrent streams, meaning you can connect more devices to the same account; and at the highest tier, an annual bag of unspecified anime swag. The new membership options are available in North America as of today, with a plan for all other territories to get full availability by early September.
The new tiers are labeled as Mega Fan, at $9.99 per month, and Ultimate Fan, at $14.99 per month. These arrive in conjunction to the previously available Free tier, which offers ad-supported access to Crunchyroll’s shows, and the premium $7.99 per month premium membership, which is now called Fan.
The Fan tier, grants access to the Crunchyroll library ad-free, which includes new shows that will premiere on the same day and date as they debut in Japan, as well as access to the Crunchyroll manga library. Mega Fans also get offline viewing options, access to four concurrent streams, and a coupon for $15 off a purchase of $100 every three months from Crunchyroll’s online store. Ultimate Fans get all the previous bonuses, six concurrent streams, exclusive access to particular merchandise in the Crunchyroll store, and a coupon for $25 off a purchase of $100 every three months.
Crunchyroll reported at the end of July 2020 that it had surpassed 3 million paid users, with a total of over 70 million registered accounts on the site, which represents a solid and accelerating growth over time for its subscription base. The service was founded in 2006 in San Francisco by a bunch of Berkeley students as a “passion project,” dedicated to hosting fansubbed videos from Asia, and quickly grew into a legal distributor for multiple anime and television companies. It was acquired by AT&T shell company Otter Media in 2014 and subsequently branched out into original anime production, investment, and localization for the home video market, in addition to other pursuits like an apparel line. Crunchyroll fully came under AT&T’s control in 2018.
The new membership tiers at Crunchyroll come in the context of AT&T’s continuing mad scramble for cash, following a series of recent layoffs at other Warner properties such as HBO, Warner Brothers, TBS, and DC Comics. Crunchyroll itself is rumored to be up for sale, following reports that AT&T has met with officials at Sony about selling off the service. With that in mind, it’s hard not to regard the Ultimate Fan tier’s emphasis on selling subscribers more merchandise from the Crunchyroll store – or at least getting rid of a bunch of it by packing it into blind boxes – as the product of pressure from AT&T for all its departments to raise revenues, as the company’s overwhelming debt load seems to be driving all of its decisions at the moment.
Source: Deadline
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