The western world’s obsession with Japan’s big wide world of anime isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, as the world’s most popular streaming service for the medium, Crunchyroll, continues to grow, and grow. In the fiscal year that has passed, the platform’s paid subscriber count has topped 10 million.
These figures come from the full-year report from the streamer’s parent company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, which purchased Crunchyroll from AT&T back in 2021 for a staggering $1.1 billion. While its acquisition of Crunchyroll has turned out to be a lucrative move, Sony Pictures as a whole saw a 45 percent drop in operating income in the fiscal year, seemingly as a result of no runaway box office successes like Spider-Man: No Way Home or Venom: Let There Be Carnage, via THR.
However, pulling the lens back even further to how Sony performed as a whole, across all of its divisions, it did see its overall sales grow by 16 percent on the previous corresponding period, thanks to strength in music and sensors. The other drag on its profits was its gaming division – despite strong sales numbers across hardware and software, it was hit by increased operating costs as a result of a weakened Japanese Yen.
Circling back to Crunchyroll, though, it’s great to see interest in our beloved medium continue to grow, which has undoubtedly been helped along more recently by the debut of the hotly-anticipated final wave of Attack on Titan episodes, and its continued efforts to synergize with Funimation.