Name: How Crunchyroll became a global anime streaming empire | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-06-02T21:01:10.000Z
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Anime, or Japanese animation, is no niche.

In fact, it's one of the fastest growing entertainment sectors.

And at the center of it all is Crunchyroll.

A streaming platform that started from nothing to become a global empire with 17 million subscribers across 200 countries.

Crunchyroll is a media and entertainment company focused on bringing Japanese anime to audiences worldwide.

There's about 1.5 billion anime viewers or anime curious fans around the world outside of China and Japan.

So it's a pretty big market and we are honored to be able to serve those audience across their fandom.

Crunchyroll works like any other streaming service, mixing up in-house programs and cutting deals to bring others to the platform with an impressive pace.

Majority of our content, we license from creative partners in Japan.

So producers, creators, artists in Japan create shows. We subtitle them into many languages within an hour after Japanese broadcast.

And then we also dub it into about 10 different languages.

Right now, Crunchyroll's biggest hit is probably Solo Leveling, an anime which incorporates elements of video games, particularly the idea of, as the name suggests, leveling up.

For all of these fans that have grown up in games that know all the trends and themes, when they see them within a narrative story, it is attractive.

So Solo Leveling is a great example, this is a show that we brought last year in January to our fans.

It was a big hit, was a number one show on the platform in most of the regions we were in.

And this year in January, we released season two.

I said, art crafter, then anime keeps getting bigger.

And the growth of animation means Crunchyroll isn't the only player in town, with such a big market, other streaming services like Netflix have inevitably gotten involved.

Streaming platforms have definitely contributed towards the growth of anime abroad, recently in the last two years or so, the Association of Japanese Animation says that the overseas anime market has just overtaken the domestic anime market.

Crunchyroll controls probably about 75% of all of the anime titles that are aired in Japan today that leaves the remaining quarter for all of the other streaming platforms.

Perhaps the biggest anime to come out of Netflix in the past year is Delicious in Dungeon, which sees adventurers set out on expeditions whilst eating the monsters they defeat.

Was that a show, for example, that you yourselves were trying to get?

Were you negotiating to try and get it onto Crunchyroll?

Yeah, like there is almost 300 shows made in Japan every year.

And we want to get as much of that content exclusively on our service.

So much to somebody who's not in that world, it almost sounds a bit like a football club, you know?

And they're trying to sign a player from overseas.

But it's not just TV that Crunchyroll's involved in.

The anime giant's behind half the top 20 anime films in US box office history.

Including three Demon Slayer flicks and a fourth coming later this year.

Demon Slayer unseated the worldwide box office numbers for the most successful anime film ever and that was Studio Ghibli spirited away.

It held on to that title for over 20 years until Demon Slayer Mugan train came out in theaters.

They want to collect merchandise or figures, play a game that's based on their favorite anime show, watch a movie with friends and family on a big screen, we make all of that available.

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How Crunchyroll became a global anime streaming empire | BBC News

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