Project Geekology
Embark on an epic journey with Anthony and Dakota as they delve into the vast realms of geek culture, from cherished classics to cutting-edge creations. Join us for an exhilarating adventure of exploration and nostalgia, as we unearth hidden gems and reminisce about the moments that have shaped us. Welcome to the ultimate celebration of all things geeky!
Project Geekology
Minisode: Crunchyroll
Ever wonder how a scrappy pirate site became the world's premier anime streaming platform?
In this bite-sized episode, Anthony dives into the origins and rise of Crunchyroll, the streaming platform that revolutionized how anime is watched around the globe. From its humble beginnings as a small startup to becoming a powerhouse in the anime industry, Anthony explores how Crunchyroll built its massive library, shaped fan culture, and even sparked major industry changes. Whether you’re a longtime subscriber or just curious about the platform’s history, this mini-episode packs all the key moments you need to know!
Check out the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to glimpse Crunchyroll's early days and appreciate just how far this platform has come in revolutionizing anime consumption worldwide. And don't forget to tune in next week when we'll be discussing James Gunn's new Superman movie!
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Welcome to a mini episode of Project Geekology, and today it's just Anthony. This week we are not going to be having a full episode. That'll be reserved for next week. Next week we will be covering the new Superman movie, so stay tuned to that. But and and I won't talk too much about what I've been up to, I did see, as of the day of recording, I actually did go and see Superman, so I'm definitely excited to discuss that with Dakota and Rich, and you will hear that next week. But this week I'm, you know, for this mini episode, or mini-sode, I'm covering a topic that I've wanted to cover for a little while now, or minisode. I'm covering a topic that I've wanted to cover for a little while now, and that's Crunchyroll. I feel like Crunchyroll. You could reserve a full episode for Crunchyroll, but then again you could also reserve an entire series on Crunchyroll because it definitely has an interesting past to it.
Speaker 0:Within the next 15 to 20 minutes, I want to talk about crunchy roll. We have several. I know we have a lot of fans of the podcast that are anime fans, especially with demon slayer being our most popular podcast episode. We actually that one actually gets a lot of listens a day. So or I mean by a lot like, I guess, for our standards it's a lot, and we appreciate that support. So I I thought why not talk about a website that is very influential, especially with anime and the west and the way that we consume anime here in the west, and I mean it's used worldwide, but it really does find its roots here in the united states and so I guess, with that being said, I'm going to hop in and talk about it and I guess, through the years, from its inception, or from its creation all the way up until modern day. So Crunchyroll has been around for a while.
Speaker 0:Actually, crunchyroll was created in May of 2006 by four UC Berkeley grads Kung Gao, james, lin, brandon Oi and Vu Nguyen I am so sorry for butchering any of those names and it's really interesting that this project, crunchyroll, was really just like a side project. It was something that these gentlemen created with YouTube having been around for not that long. Honestly, at that point, what crunchyroll was? It was? It was essentially you. It was a clone of youtube, for east asian fan uploaded videos. That's really what it was at that time, in its inception, and something that's really cool that we have out there if you're interested in seeing what crunchyrollroll looked like in that era we do have there is a website called the Wayback Machine, and pretty much what it is is an archive of different websites and there's more than just websites but you can use it to pretty much go back to see what YouTube looked like back in the day, what Google looked like back in the day, and you could do the same with Crunchyroll and I actually did that recently and obviously things progress over the years. But it really is interesting to see how Crunchyroll looks now compared to what it looked like back then. I mean, it really did look like a project that a group of friends made, and so pretty much from its inception up until 2008, anime was being regularly uploaded there and it was pretty much fan subbed at that time.
Speaker 0:Yes, crunchyroll and its inception was essentially what KissAnime was. It was a pirate website. It was a website where you were able to watch anime illegally and fans, would you know they would sub it. They would create their own subs for a lot of the anime. And something that really interested me in my research was that sometime in 2008, crunchyroll had gotten a large investment from an investment firm called Venrock, and it was around $4.05 million and I mean I guess they saw what the website could potentially be and that was really smart for them because I mean, look at what Crunchyroll is now. But that really didn't hold up well with Bondi and Funimation. They were pretty upset with that because still at this point, crunchyroll was still allowing unauthorized, illegal content to be uploaded regularly, and so, yeah, but I guess, with that being in mind, that the founders of Crunchy in 2008, like late 2008, they ended up going to japan to negotiate licensing deals with tv tokyo so that they could actually legally stream naruto, shippuden, and pretty much what happened when they got that deal was that, you know, all the illegal stuff went away. So this is when, so late 2008, this is when they started to become legitimate, you know. So we had a couple of years where Crunchyroll was the kiss anime of anime back in that that era. So I thought that was really interesting, that that era, so I thought that was really interesting.
Speaker 0:And then, sometime in 2010, crunchy roll actually started to actually sell physical content. You know how? In crunchy roll, you can buy figures, you can buy manga, you can buy anime different things. Well, this is where the start of that happened here in 2010. They, so they they licensed the north american dvd rights to five centimeters per second. I didn't really look too much into that anime I don't know much about it, but the fun fact about this is the is that that was actually the first physical product that crunchyroll offered outside of streaming, so I thought that was pretty cool.
Speaker 0:So we fast forward to to late 2013 in, uh, december so we're pretty much like towards the end of 2013 and we have a company called the Churnin Group and they acquire controlling interest of Crunchyroll and TV. Tokyo and the founders of Crunchyroll still retained a significant stake in Crunchyroll, which to me, is smart. In April of 2014, churnin partnered with AT&T to form Otter Media, committing $ million dollars to ott ventures, including crunchyroll. So at&t and churnin they they group up together and they pump money into this umbrella that that includes crunchyroll in it. This was interesting. In august of 2015 so over a year later, otter media which that umbrella that included crunchyroll they launched something called elation and that houses crunchyroll and a streaming service that it's no longer around. It's spelt VRV, but it's pronounced Verve, and this was launched in 2016. And so Verve was really interesting.
Speaker 0:I had it for a little while Back in 2018, I went to New York Comic Con with Dakota and we've talked about this before and in New York Comic Con there was a Crunchyroll presence and then there was a VRV presence, and so I thought it was interesting. So, after checking it out a little bit, I decided to subscribe to it and it was actually pretty decent, I guess, for what it offered and what you had to pay. You didn't really have to pay all that much. I think it was like $10. And you had access to Crunchyroll, funimation and HiDive. This one app offered a trifecta of different anime so you could get your dubs and Funimation, you could get your subs and Crunchyroll and then whatever HiDive offered at the time, and they they offered Verve offered other stuff. They had Geek and Sundry on there and a couple of other things like old school cartoons, I think, nicktoons and stuff.
Speaker 0:It's been a while, but the service for that ended up shutting down in sometime in 2023. By then, the only thing that was like left over as far as anime was just crunchy roll. Funimation left pretty early on and then high dive ended up leaving also. I might be flipping those around, but all I know is that they ended up leaving at some point. But yeah, so the cool thing is is that in late 2015, crunchyroll had around 700 000 paying subscribers and that was really cool, you know, like finding that out, I mean, we started to get, you know, anime starting to become a lot more accessible, a lot. I mean.
Speaker 0:I think I don't think people realize, like, how hard anime was. It was hard to access anime for a while and even with crunchyroll, not everybody was on crunchyroll at the time and you know, like we said, it was, some of it was fan subbing, so you might not have gotten a% correct localization and you know it's like somebody abridging it or something. And so we fast forward into 2016. And in 2016, this is where Crunchyroll starts dubbing anime. Crunchyroll for a long time was mostly subs, it was mostly just subtitled anime and this is around when they started releasing blu-ray and dvd titles in mid-2016, in late 2016, they enter into a a bit of a partnership with funimation, into a a bit of a partnership with Funimation to share content. So pretty much they were like sharing each other's content to be able to kind of, I guess, so that people had more options for anime for both. But still, you know there was still a lot that was only offered on Funimation and stuff that was only offered on Crunchyroll, and, and so this was late 2016.
Speaker 0:In early 2017, around February, crunchyroll was around 1 million subscribers. That's a lot of 300,000 people. So that's awesome and we would say, give or take that number. And something that was hacked early in the morning and that it redirected people to a crunchyviewerexe download. So you know you're you're downloading malware when, when you're trying to access your anime, you're downloading malware into your computer. That's crazy and it said so. So, yeah, so around that time I mean the way that they fought that was that they had to take the website down and they did this around 6 am and it took them about three hours to regain control of the website and about 30 minutes later they, you know, restore the service. But that's that's crazy. You know that they got hacked and it took them. It took them a few hours to get control. So them hackers, definitely they did some work. So we fast forward up to 2018.
Speaker 0:Otter Media buys out the remaining shares of crunchyroll from tv tokyo and, by august 2018, at&t fully acquires otter. They merge crunchyroll into warner media in october 2018. The partnership that crunchyroll has with with funimation. That pretty much ends at the, the. There's a corporate ownership shift so that so that partnership you know it gets shut down. So in december of 2020, sony's Funimation Global Group. They acquire Crunchyroll for about $1.175 billion and it takes a little under a year for that deal to like finally close. At this point, funimation is owned by Sony, funimation is owned by Sony. So now you have Sony that has control of Funimation and now Crunchyroll.
Speaker 0:I also read was that so after that acquisition, the amount of people who paid for subscriptions went from 5 million to 15 million. This was by late 2024 that this happened, and so after this deal finally goes through, in august of 2021, funimation and crunchyroll merge. It was like a slow burn kind of merger, not super slow, but, like you know, you still had funimation, you still had access to funivate until eventually they were prepping people like, okay, you know, funimation is, you know, after a while they're not going to put any new anime on there, you know. So, yeah, we're, you know we're caught up.
Speaker 0:You know there's a lot of other stuff that you can talk about crunchyroll, you know we have the, the anime awards. There's different things that crunchyroll does, but for me, the biggest thing that I wanted to talk about was kind of like how it went from like this small pirate site up to a huge force and the way that we consume anime. And you know, we we have netflix out there, we have hulu out there and even prime, and they are really really like boxing when it comes to the availability of anime and also like creating their own anime, like there's anime out there that now is under the Netflix banner. I think even Prime has their own anime. So there's definitely competition out there. But I would say that you know, I don't know if that competition would be out there if we didn't have websites out there like Crunchyroll and Funimation. You know a lot of them are, like, really important.
Speaker 0:You don't really hear every day about a pirate website becoming a legitimate spearhead. I mean, it happens, but it's almost like, for instance, it's almost like the Pirate Bay, almost like the pirate bay becoming a legitimate movie distributor. You know it's really mind-boggling the story of crunchyroll, and you know I I really do suggest you going to the wayback machine and seeing what crunchyroll looked like back. Then it really will blow your mind. You're like, wow, this is the website that started the way that we consume anime and and it's, it's really cool. It's.
Speaker 0:It's definitely something that I've wanted to cover for a while and, like I said, we, like I said I could do a whole episode on this I could do. I could easily do an hour or more covering this, but I wanted to get really the gist of it, and I mean, for the most part, a lot of the meat of their journey is in this discussion. Thank you for listening to this mini-sode of project geekology and keep your ear out for next week we will be discussing the james gunn superman movie. Like I said, I'm definitely excited to discuss that with dakota and rich. Keep your ear out for next week we will be discussing the James Gunn Superman movie. Like I said, I'm definitely excited to discuss that with Dakota and Rich, so definitely keep an eye out for that. Thank you for listening to this and I hope you enjoy it. I hope you all have a great rest of your week. Bye.
