Sony Crunchyroll Buyout Complete With Big PlayStation Plus Potential

Late last year, Sony announced that it had entered an agreement to purchase anime streaming service Crunchyroll from AT&T for a whopping $1.175 billion. Fast forward eight months and Sony has announced that the planned acquisition is now complete – Crunchyroll will join the Sony family, which importantly includes another anime streaming service called Funimation. It sounds like Sony has some big plans for Crunchyroll as well.

For starters, Sony will waste little time in consolidating its anime services. In a press release [PDF] announcing the completed acquisition, Sony indicated that it will combine Crunchyroll and Funimation into one service as soon as it can.

"With the addition of Crunchyroll, we have an unprecedented opportunity to serve anime fans like never before and deliver the anime experience across any platform they choose, from theatrical, events, home entertainment, games, streaming, linear TV – everywhere and every way fans want to experience their anime," Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra said in the announcement. "Our goal is to create a unified anime subscription experience as soon as possible."

That's big enough on its own, but Eurogamer today reports that Sony may offer Crunchyroll subscriptions as part of a premium PlayStation Plus membership. It sounds like those plans aren't concrete yet, but it's a move that makes a lot of sense. After all, Sony has already experimented with adding some of its movie content to PlayStation Plus, albeit on a rather limited scale.

Unfortunately, Eurogamer's report was light on details, so we're not sure how much this premium PlayStation Plus subscription would cost. We'll keep our eyes peeled for more details, but for now, it's looking like we can expect a lot for Crunchyroll in the future.