I have to say, I’m very perplexed by what happened with Funimation and this Ishuzoku Reviewers, also known as Interspecies Reviewers anime. You had one job Funimation, and you somehow mess that up! However, that’s not the talking point I want to focus on, where I want to direct the conversation to is the discussion on whether or not Funimation is utilizing underhanded tactics to secure popular anime for its platform.
Right, so before I go into it, here’s a brief rundown as to what happened. So Funimation recently acquired and released the dub version of Ishuzoku Reviewers, also known as Interspecies Reviewers, an anime about two dudes going into various brothels and rating the girls based on species.
One quick google search will tell you this anime is not for kids. Anyways, what’s amazing about this is that Funimation did not check to see what type of anime they had acquired and pretty much dub voiced, screened the anime, posted the episode on their platform, and only then realised that Ishuzoku Reviewers did not fit their guidelines. Even though, they already produced other anime that’s similar to this Ishuzoku Reviewers anime but I digress.
Truth be told, it’s the funniest thing I have seen happen to a major corporation in a while but it reveals are underlining strategy that Funimation seems to be practising in order to stay viable, that is, to buy up any and all anime away from their competitors and host it exclusively on their platform. It proves that Netflix, Amazon Prime and all these other streaming platform are proving to be a threat to them.
With Netflix and other streaming services buying up more and more anime, it seems that Funimation no longer has the time to check the types of anime their buying up, and are willing to to take the risk so long as their competitors don’t have access to that anime. Truth be told, it makes sense to try and out-best your competitors but to just randomly buy up any, and all anime that seems popular, without screening it to see if it fits with your policy is kinda clumsily on their part.
Either way, this is great for the consumers, it means that these streaming platforms will have no choice but to adapt in order to survive. That’s means improving user interface, add quality of life feature and/or just create original content.
