‘India 2nd largest anime market for Crunchyroll’
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI : Global anime brand Crunchyroll sees India as the second largest anime market in the world after the US and expects 60% of the global growth in the next few years in the category to come from the country. Crunchyroll, LLC is an independent joint venture between Sony Pictures Entertainment in US and Aniplex in Japan, a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., both subsidiaries of Tokyo-based Sony Group Corp. “India is still a nascent market for us but we’re seeing really strong fandom for anime across the country, and not just in metros but also from tier-two and three towns.
Anime is not just a metro phenomenon here at all," Rahul Purini, president of Crunchyroll saidin an interview. The company is available as a D2C (direct-to-consumer) service across the web and app with both paid subscriptions as well as free, ad-led tiers. Currently, it has 500 shows and 3,800 hours of content for Indian audiences and is planning to add about 20-30 shows globally every quarter.
Globally, the service has over 24,000 hours of content. In India, other than a two-week free trial, there are two subscriptions available—for ₹79 and ₹99, both per month. The latter offers additional features such as offline viewing and more simultaneous streams.
Purini said the platform has about 11 million paying subscribers worldwide. As far as India-specific figures go, there are 118 million users watching anime content across linear and digital platforms with 53 million estimated to be watching on official sources and 20 million paying for such programming. The company does not disclose India-specific subscriber numbers.
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