Crunchyroll is shutting down Funimation streaming app (and you're losing all the anime you bought with it)

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Since Sony and Funimation acquired Crunchyroll for more than $1 billion back in 2021, we all knew the days of both companies having separate streaming apps were limited. With Crunchyroll becoming the brand the company was moving forward with, Funimation’s days as a streamer were numbered. Now, those days are finally coming to an end, with the Funimation app shutting down and merging your account with Crunchyroll in April 2024.

The Funimation app, which had been the company’s streaming service before the merger, will officially shut down on April 2, 2024. Before then, fans have a few options on how to carry over their data. If they already have a Crunchyroll account with the same email as their Funimation account, they can merge the watch lists and viewing history of the two on Crunchyroll. Or they can import their Funimation data into a new Crunchyroll account to save starting from scratch. Fans will be able to pick the option they want the next time they log into the Crunchyroll website or app between now and April 2.

There is a major casualty in this process, however. If you’ve purchased digital copies of any shows through the Funimation app, those will not be valid through Crunchyroll. In essence, you’ll lose access to those digital copies forever when Funimation shuts down its servers on April 2. While this is always a danger when it comes to digital media, it feels especially frustrating when many of the same products are currently available in the Crunchyroll store.

Another issue is that, at the moment, not every show in Funimation’s library is available from Crunchyroll, especially in overseas markets, despite the company starting the process of migrating its library across in Spring 2022. Shows like Dragon Ball are only just moving to Crunchyroll in the UK and France, for example. With companies like Netflix having the rights to some shows in different markets, it could be several years before the two libraries are completely merged, but might not make up for the loss of any digital copies you’ve lost along the way.

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