Hello everyone, I'm Rahul Purini, President of Crunchyroll. I'm honored to be here today to talk about our business and our passion for anime. There's no better time to be a fan of anime and to bring joy to those anime fans than now. Today, I want to share with you a bit about Crunchyroll's journey so far, the amazing audience and fan community we serve, and the phenomenal opportunity in front of us. I'll walk you through our business today and the strategic priorities we are focused on. We've heard a lot of questions from the investment community, so we will, of course, dedicate some time to those as well. There's so much I'm excited to share. Let's get started. The Crunchyroll business today is the culmination of a long history.
We have known for decades that anime is something really special, and we feel it is our privilege to share it with the world. That begins with a deep commitment to our partners in Japan, dating back to the launch of Funimation in the mid-1990s. At that time, anime was difficult to access, and the budding company brought some of the most iconic anime series, Dragon Ball, for example, to the United States for the first time. Crunchyroll was launched in 2006 with a similar goal of sharing our love for this art form. Crunchyroll's launch coincided with a technology shift towards online streaming. Fast forward to 2017, Funimation joined the Sony Group through Sony Pictures Entertainment.
In 2021, the Sony Group, through Funimation, completed the acquisition of Crunchyroll, bringing together two great businesses with a common vision to super serve anime fans by connecting them to stories they love and the creators behind them. Now, in 2025, Crunchyroll is a truly global company with more than 15 offices worldwide and more than 1,000 employees, and still growing. To introduce myself, I joined the Funimation team 10 years ago as Chief Technology Officer to begin to guide the company through its transformation to have a direct-to-consumer focus. I then became the Chief Operating Officer when we joined the Sony Group and oversaw our global expansion and our localization efforts, ensuring anime fans worldwide could enjoy content in their own language. I'm proud to say that our localization is still best in class today.
Our team then undertook an enormous multi-year effort to integrate Crunchyroll and Funimation after the acquisition. Now, I'm serving as President of the Unified Crunchyroll and couldn't be more thrilled with our team and more energized about the future of anime. Let's talk about what anime means. Anime isn't a genre; it's an incredible storytelling medium. Whether it's action, romance, sci-fi, or slice of life, anime has a unique ability to connect with fans on a deeper level. Anime also has a very deep resonance with fans, particularly with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Anime fans use the medium as a source of creative inspiration and personal self-expression that other entertainment mediums may not cultivate in the same enduring and identity-defining way. I liken it to the ecstatic fandom you see with professional sports. You just don't see this type of fan energy anywhere else.
Crunchyroll is purpose-built for anime fans, meaning we're singularly focused on serving the anime fan. The largest share of our audience is Gen Z and younger millennials. The Crunchyroll user is also highly engaged. Half of Crunchyroll's subscribers watch anime on the service each and every day, and more than 50% will follow social media groups, forums, and YouTube channels devoted to anime. We certainly see this engagement across our social media platforms, where we manage 160 million followers across all our channels and delivered seven billion impressions last year. What's important to understand is that for many people, anime is not just a type of show they like to watch. It can be an all-consuming lifestyle where people express their fandom and connect with the community through music, games, collectible merchandise, and so much more.
The list of celebrities and their kids who truly love anime is growing exponentially too: Channing Tatum, Megan Thee Stallion, Michael B. Jordan, Shohei Ohtani from Dodgers, Indian film actors Rashmika Mandanna and Tiger Shroff, and global super group BTS are just a few in a very long list of famous fans. Professional athletes in the NFL, NBA, Premier League, and more have been some of our most vocal champions, identifying closely with and taking inspiration from the struggles and triumphs of anime heroes. Anime is one of the fastest-growing sectors of entertainment. Outside of Japan and China, over 1.5 billion people are either actively watching anime or are aware and curious about anime. We see a massive opportunity to bring more of them into our ecosystem.
Crunchyroll users are globally distributed, but our subscriber base is particularly strong in regions where Crunchyroll has the longest history, such as North America, Western Europe, and Latin America. We are also seeing rapid growth in our emerging markets. Markets like India, Mexico, and Brazil have all shown growth surges with continued potential. While Crunchyroll subscribers continue to grow, our data shows this is a low % of the total opportunity in each market. As I mentioned earlier, Crunchyroll is a media and entertainment company focused on serving anime fans. We often say that Crunchyroll doesn't aim to be something for everyone, but rather everything to someone, that someone being the anime fan. We know that for our community, anime isn't just something to watch; it's a lifestyle. Fans want to bring anime beyond the screen and make it part of their everyday lives.
That's why millions of fans around the world choose Crunchyroll. We provide a truly immersive anime fan experience that goes far beyond streaming. We are best known for our streaming video on demand, SVOD service. We add more than 50 new titles to our platform every anime season, and our extensive catalog includes more than 50,000 episodes and feature films, and more than 25,000 hours of anime content. Series dubbed in fans' local language make the content even more accessible. We offer both subtitled and dubbed localized content in more than 10 languages as part of our SVOD offering. We also subtitle and dub many series in-house, working with an extensive network of more than 600 voice actors. Crunchyroll revenue is primarily generated by paid memberships for streaming video content that we license from Japan. Crunchyroll does not operate as a direct-to-consumer business in Japan.
Anime is beloved and widely accessible in Japan, and our partnership with Japanese creators is to amplify and grow the love for anime and their intellectual property around the world. Similar to Japan, China also has established local suppliers of anime content, and this is not a territory we serve. To help new fans experiment with our service, we offer a limited seven-day free trial. For curious viewers, we have an ad-supported video on demand AVOD offering with about 1,000 hours of free content for viewers to sample a wide range of anime. Once fans are interested in diving deeper, Crunchyroll offers three tiers of paid subscription memberships for fans to choose from in the United States: Crunchyroll Fan, Crunchyroll Mega Fan, and Crunchyroll Ultimate Fan tiers. Internationally, fans can select either the Fan or Mega Fan membership tiers.
These memberships grant users access to offline viewing, concurrent streaming devices, discounts and offers to the Crunchyroll-owned and operated e-commerce store, and more. Crunchyroll Game Vault offers Crunchyroll Mega Fan and Ultimate Fan subscription members unlimited access to a growing library of premium mobile games. We now have 50 titles in our Game Vault library, with more to launch soon. Anime fans like to wear their fandom on their sleeve, literally, which is why Crunchyroll offers merchandise direct-to-consumer through the online Crunchyroll store, including special deals and discounts for premium members. The Crunchyroll store is the ultimate online shop for anime fans, with more than 20,000 products across over 4,000 titles. This includes one-of-a-kind merchandise collaborations with Logic, who launched a Cowboy Bebop collaboration with Crunchyroll last summer, Lady Gaga, and Megan Thee Stallion, to name a few.
Later this year, Crunchyroll expects to partner with some of the titans in manga publishing from Japan to offer Crunchyroll subscribers added value with the Crunchyroll Digital Manga app, available as a paid edition to their membership. However, Crunchyroll's streaming platform is just the beginning of the anime journey. We offer fans a variety of ways to get immersed and to express their passion for anime. For example, there is nothing like enjoying your favorite anime on the big screen, especially in a movie theater alongside other fans. Together with our partners at Sony Pictures Entertainment, Crunchyroll has been integral to growing anime and its theatrical offerings globally. Since 2020, we have released 66 films that have grossed a total of $427 million at the box office. In the last four years, we have released three of the top five highest-grossing anime films of all time at the U.S.
...box office. Overall, we have released half of the top 20 highest-grossing anime films in U.S. box office history. This year, fans are eagerly awaiting the release of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Infinity Castle, the first film in an epic trilogy that represents the final arc and culmination of the hugely popular award-winning anime shonen series, coming exclusively to theaters globally later this year. Crunchyroll curates events and experiences at significant global conventions to build a community and deepen fan passion. We also hold the annual Crunchyroll Anime Awards, which is our celebration of the creators, studios, and performers behind the anime titles that have captivated fans throughout the past year. By immersing fans into the worlds of their favorite series through e-commerce, gaming, theatrical offerings, events, and more, we are solidifying Crunchyroll as the world's ultimate home for the anime community.
Crunchyroll had just three million subscribers when Funimation announced its acquisition in 2020. By December of 2022, Crunchyroll passed 10 million subscribers. We have now surpassed 15 million subscribers globally, and we are just getting started. Now that I've walked you through our business, I'm going to talk about Crunchyroll's key strategic priorities going forward, which are content, distribution, membership benefits, and collaborations across Sony. Crunchyroll has a long history of being the exclusive home to some of the most beloved and treasured anime titles. Exclusive content plays a crucial role in our strategy. It not only drives membership growth, but also allows us to amplify the reach and impact of Japanese IP, strengthening the global anime ecosystem. Crunchyroll works to bring the best new anime to our global audience by licensing the top series created by our partners in Japan.
A great example of this is Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, a series that has captivated fans worldwide and won numerous awards at the Anime Awards over the years. Crunchyroll is also an active investor in co-productions, such as the dark fantasy series Solo Leveling, which became the number one title in Crunchyroll in 2024. Investing in the local Japanese anime ecosystem ensures a strong pipeline of creators and content while contributing to the sustenance of healthy studio capacity. We are also expanding our approach to new IP, looking at untapped sources and stories for our international audience. The upcoming Ghost of Tsushima is a great example of taking a hit video game and adapting it into anime for global fans. We want to meet fans wherever they are, so our service is available across devices and platforms.
Whether fans watch on mobile, consoles, smart TVs, or other platforms, we're committed to making anime easy to access anytime and anywhere. This means that Crunchyroll must be included on all types of devices and platforms with native and frictionless payment and viewing experiences. Crunchyroll is also available through prominent global content distributors and publishers so that fans can access Crunchyroll in many of the places they already aggregate their content for easier access. Over the last year, we have partnered with Claro, Comcast, Roku, Sky, Telus, and YouTube, and expanded our footprint on Amazon Prime Video Channels. As I've said, this is a 360-degree lifestyle business. Delivering value for our fans through a comprehensive Crunchyroll membership program is absolutely core for us. By continually adding to what fans can expect from a Crunchyroll membership, we are driving higher customer retention and engagement across the service.
Some of the latest Crunchyroll membership benefits include the ever-expanding Crunchyroll Game Vault, as I mentioned earlier, and music streaming on Crunchyroll through a partnership with Sony Music Entertainment Japan, which added 3,300 Japanese music videos and concert specials to the service. Since we joined the Sony Group a few years ago, we have discovered such a rich network of partnerships in every aspect of the business. Let's start with content. Aniplex is one of the absolute top-tier global anime producers and a trusted partner with collaborations that have allowed us to create outstanding new series to delight global fans, like Solo Leveling and Ghost of Tsushima, a new series based on the award-winning video game that we are developing with Aniplex, Sony Music Entertainment, and PlayStation Productions. Recently, we announced a new partnership with Aniplex to create a joint venture that will produce premiere anime for global fans.
The partnership with Aniplex extends to Sony Pictures Entertainment too, where we are thrilled to bring the highly anticipated Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Infinity Castle to global theaters later this year. We also know that gamers and anime fans have enormous overlap, which is why we're thrilled to leverage that connection by partnering with Sony Interactive Entertainment to launch the Pay with PlayStation integration. New and returning users can now subscribe to Crunchyroll Premium directly on their PlayStation 5 console with a seamless sign-up experience. Moving further into hardware, if you have a Sony Bravia TV at home, you've already seen our Crunchyroll button on the remote, providing one-button access to our deep anime library. I have to mention the Crunchyroll Anime Awards again, which has quickly become one of the most exciting industry events each year.
This is an annual star-studded award ceremony we host in Japan together with Sony Music Solutions, a part of Sony Music Entertainment Japan. If you haven't seen it before, tune in this May. We get to celebrate the creative talent behind the screens as we tally tens of millions of words from viewers worldwide. Sony Music Entertainment Japan has also helped us bring anime music even closer to fans. Just this past summer, we brought Japanese artist LiSA to San Diego Comic-Con for her first U.S. performance in 10 years. Sony's new partnership with Kadokawa is exciting too. We have a long history with the publisher, and we are looking forward to deepening our relationship there. As you can see, the synergies across the Sony portfolio have been outstanding already, and we believe we are just at the beginning of what we can accomplish together.
To reiterate, Crunchyroll is a business built on decades of deep relationships with both creators and fans. We have experience building IP into franchises and providing 360-degree monetization opportunities for anime creators. We also specialize in creating immersive experiences that bring the anime community even closer to the content they love. We are excited to continue our momentum together with the broader Sony team, and we remain focused on our future growth and execution of our strategic vision. Most of all, we are excited to bring fans more of what they love. Thank you, everyone. I'll take a few questions now.
I'm Justin Hill with Investor Relations at Sony. And Rahul, thank you very much for a very informative presentation. Thank you also for taking some questions from our investors. I'd like to start by talking about price increases.
SVOD services such as Netflix have been raising prices, and I know that Crunchyroll actually just raised prices in May of 2024. How do you balance price increases with the goal of growing subscribers?
Thank you, Justin. Crunchyroll's price change in 2024 was the first price change we made in five years, and it was the first one after the Crunchyroll and Funimation merger, where we were able to put all our content in one place under one brand so anime fans would not have to carry multiple services. We also started adding 50-60 new simulcast shows per quarter. We expanded our library of films, and we added a catalog of music videos in addition to launching our Game Vault portfolio, which is now up to 50 games. Price increases allow us to continue to give fans more of what they love and balance growth.
Great. Thank you.
Now, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are all clearly interested in anime. How does Crunchyroll differentiate versus those services?
What is a category or a segment or maybe a genre to other streaming services is our entire world. Because of that, we see so much diversity in the anime fandom and look to deliver exciting experiences for many types of fans beyond streaming through theatrical releases, events, merchandise, a robust selection of games, and much more. That does lead us to have the largest catalog of anime. While fans can sample anime content across various platforms, there is no other service that curates an anime catalog with the depth and breadth of Crunchyroll. As I mentioned earlier, we have over 50,000 episodes and films, and that adds up to 25,000 plus hours of anime content.
This means we offer a meaningful number of shows across genres like romance, sci-fi, slice of life, isekai, shonen, etc. We do take it beyond the series. As I mentioned, we have games, music, and we offer our subscribers compelling value and exclusive products on our Crunchyroll store, which has some of the most exciting merchandise out there. We also just announced we will offer a digital manga add-on this year. Subscribers also get benefits at many anime events and comic cons around the world. Different fans want different things, and we try to deliver excitement in many ways, one of which is obviously the streaming content, but there are many other ways to explore.
Great. Thank you. Coming back to content for a moment, you mentioned your success in collaborating with Aniplex on Solo Leveling.
What is Crunchyroll's activity when it comes to content creation, and how is that changing? Are you doing more original content with other studios in Japan, and do you work with content creators outside of Japan?
For us, anime is inherently a Japanese art form, and it is one of the most important things that fans get excited about. Honoring anime's authenticity is of the utmost importance to us. That is why our co-productions are produced in collaboration with partners in Japan. Participating in co-productions allows us to give our audience new and engaging stories that they can only find on Crunchyroll. Like I said, we offer fans about 50 new series each anime season. Because we have such a close relationship to our fans, we have a great sense of what will perform well on our platform.
We bring these audience insights to our Japanese partners when considering and collaborating on new anime series. Finally, anime fans want compelling stories, and we are open to adapting international source material that will resonate with the anime audience in our regions, like Solo Leveling, for example, which began as a Korean manga and has since become one of the most popular series on our platform. Examining international IP and tailoring series to our international audience allows us to fund stories that may not otherwise be told. We are excited to continue collaborating with Aniplex and all our other incredible Japanese partners to tell new stories through anime.
Great. What is the business mix within your flywheel, and what's the cost structure that goes into supporting that?
As I mentioned, Crunchyroll's core service, the main way of making revenue, is the paid streaming service.
As I also mentioned, we offer so much more than just the video experience. The subscription includes access to many other important offerings for fans, like Game Vault, e-commerce exclusives, benefits at events and conventions, and soon digital manga. Because so many elements of the flywheel are baked into the value of the subscription, we do not necessarily look at them independently, but we look at our SVOD service as a whole, and we look at what is the investment required to deliver a great experience to fans at a compelling value.
Great. That's very helpful. Now, global streaming platforms have been leaning into ad-supported offerings. What are Crunchyroll's views on ad-supported tiers?
We at Crunchyroll offer fans a free ad-supported tier with limited content offering, but we see this more as a top-of-the-funnel, a user acquisition driver.
Our AVOD offering features over 1,000 hours of rotating content to allow fans to sample all of that that Crunchyroll has to offer. Now, investors are very interested in artificial intelligence. Can you explain how AI is impacting your business? As an entertainment company, we are focused on preserving the creativity, the authenticity behind anime, which includes honoring the creators, artists, voices, and all of those involved in bringing it to screens big and small. Concurrently, as a technology company, we are also constantly exploring innovative tools and technology to better enhance our fan experience and expand our reach to anime audiences across the globe. Our team already employs AI to create efficiencies, for example, within our customer support workflow, reducing both agent and customer effort. In the near term, we do see the opportunity for AI within data analytics, fraud prevention, and copyright protection as well.
Thank you so much, Rahul. This has been very informative, and we really appreciate your time. Thank you, Justin.