Japanese company Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and AT&T has officially announced this last Monday, August 9th that SPE has completed its acquisition of  AT&T’s Crunchyroll anime business. The agreement was first announced in December 2020. The purchase price for the transaction was USD 1,175 billion. In addition, Tony Vinciquerra, CEO at SPE, reported that the aim of the operation is to ‘create a unified anime subscription experience as soon as possible’ with Funimation. 

As officially reported from Sony, Crunchyroll is a D2C OTT with 5 million SVOD subscribers, which also serves 120 million registered users across more than 200 countries and territories, including Latin American ones. In addition, from Sony they have also explained that the deal ‘provides the opportunity for Crunchyroll and Funimation to broaden distribution for their content partners and expand fan-centric offerings for consumers’.

In the case of Funimation, the platform offers a catalog of over 700 anime series and more than 13 thousand hours of content available on its own platform or third-party ones, in 49 countries. Its arrival at Latin America took place last year, when it was officially launched in Mexico and Brazil. Later, its offer was also extended to Chile, Colombia and Peru.