The market for streaming anime is mushrooming: news of corporate deals, show acquisitions, and the effects of all this on the animation studios themselves is coming thick and fast. So it’s a good time to take stock of what’s happening in this space and how we got here.
Enter “Anime Streaming Platform Wars,” a new report edited by Aurélie Petit at The Platform Lab in Montreal’s Concordia University, which researches the impact of digital platforms on culture and society. Download a free copy of the report here.
The document focuses on six anime streaming platforms in North America — Crunchyroll, Funimation, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Retrocrush, Hidive — each of which gets its own mini-chapter. The authors provide summaries of the companies’ business strategies and histories as anime distributors, providing detailed stats and quotes from executives.