Funimation Users Will Receive Compensation for Deleted Digital Libraries; How That Will Work Is Still Unclear

In many ways, the merger between Sony-owned anime platforms Funimation and Crunchyroll is a boon for fans. It brings much of the content previously available on Funimation over to the company’s flagship Crunchyroll service and provides a more expansive library of titles for anime fans to explore and engage with. However, there are significant issues involved in the process, as Funimation customers who have digital copies of certain titles are set to lose them in the migration. Sony is promising that it will make it up to subscribers, but the details are thin and the process has been less than smooth so far.

Key Points:

• Anime streamers Funimation and Crunchyroll are set to finally merge on April 2.
• At that point, digital copies of certain physical media titles purchased by Funimation customers will be deleted.
• Crunchyroll’s president has indicated that impacted users will be compensated, but the details are thus far fuzzy.

The good news for anime fans is that nearly all of the on-demand titles that they are used to watching on Funimation are already available on Crunchyroll. However, customers who received digital versions of films and series that they purchased physical copies for could see their access to those properties removed when the merger is complete on April 2. If the titles in question are not already available on-demand on one of the two services, they are set to be removed from users’ libraries.

While the April merger date is nearly (link: https://thestreamable.com/news/sonys-funimation-acquires-crunchyroll-atts-anime-streaming-service-for-1-175-billion text: three and a half years after Sony’s acquisition of Crunchyroll was initially announced, as it approaches, backlash from fans who feel as though they have been deceived has increased. However, in talking with The Verge's “Decoder” podcast, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini indicated that the company was trying to find an appropriate solution to compensate each individual user, based on their specific circumstances.

“I will say these are customers that we value a lot and are working really hard directly with each one of them to ensure that they have an appropriate value for what they got in the digital copy initially,” 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.”

While there are always extenuating terms and conditions with any digital purchase, Funimation promoted the fact that these titles would be available to stream “forever,” but that clearly is no longer the case. According to Purini, after looking at Funimation data concerning the viewership of these digital copies, the company didn’t see them as a priority moving forward.

“As we look at usage of [the digital copies] and the number of people that were redeeming those and using them,” he said, “it was just not a feature that was available in Crunchyroll and isn’t in our roadmap.”

Neither Sony streamer has released official details for the process to compensate impacted users, but Purini indicated that customer service representatives were capable of addressing individual concerns on a case-by-case basis. However, when The Verge’s Ash Parrish attempted to engage with Funimation agents, she found it far more difficult than Purini had led customers to believe.

“I opened a customer service ticket with Funimation expressing concern that my digital copies were going away in the coming sunset and asking what, if anything, the company would do about it,” she wrote. “I received two emails that were essentially the same boilerplate customer service response apologizing for the inconvenience but not providing any kind of solution to my issue.”

To help facilitate the compensation process, Sony has set up a submission form that impacted customers are asked to fill out. They can do so here, but they must use the information from their Funimation account to validate their respective purchases. While there has been no mention of a standardized process to satisfy individual users, it does at least seem that Sony has heard the complaints of long-time customers and is beginning to address their concerns.

It would seem that the company’s execs might have been more finely attuned to the issue following a similar circumstance that unfolded at the end of 2023. As the year wound down, customers who had purchased certain shows now owned by Warner Bros. Discovery were threatened with losing access to those digital titles as the content licensing arrangement between the two companies was approaching expiration. Sony had initially warned that it would be deleting all impacted titles, whether they had been purchased or downloaded for free. While this could be seen as a fair warning to customers, it might also have served as a public shot across the WBD bow, putting public pressure on the company to reengage in negotiations.

Fortunately, the two sides were able to agree to an updated deal just before Christmas to save the purchases from digital deletion. However, as the streaming world continues to reinvent itself, as companies merge, fold, and reorient themselves, it is only a matter of time before another company attempts to take away titles that customers had rightly believed would be available forever. Hopefully, when that happens, the media execs behind the decisions will learn from how Sony has handled these last examples.