Amazon Anime Strike, Crunchyroll To Offer Offline Downloads

It’s a good time to be alive for anime fans, as anime content becomes more readily available than ever before. One service that has been trying to make a name in the anime streaming boom, is the online giant Amazon. This past year Amazon launched Amazon’s Anime Strike, a streaming service that was created by the company to compete with other anime streaming services such as Crunchyroll, and Funimation. Many fans are hesitant to move away from the service they know and are comfortable with but last week, Amazon made an announcement about a service coming that may be the push they need to set it apart from the competition.

Last week Amazon’s Anime Strike announced that they will be providing an upcoming service, that is currently not available on any other anime streaming service. It will allow subscribers to view and download their favorite shows offline. This is a feature that other sites like Crunchyroll doesn’t provide or allow. This announcement from Amazon shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise, as the company has allowed subscribers to download series on it’s Amazon Prime Video service since late 2015. This is important to the anime community however, as other providers don’t currently allow subscribers to download series, even though many users have been asking for this service for awhile.

This push for features is just another way for Anime Strike to try and set itself apart from anime giants like Crunchyroll. Amazon needs the features to compete, because Crunchyroll has much better licensing. The website is arguably the biggest anime streaming service, and as such hs exclusive partnerships with many studios and publishers.

After the announcement from Amazon about the offline streaming, a rep from Crunchyroll commented to Polygon about plans for a similar service to be coming soon. The rep stated, “Our breadth of titles and relationships within the anime industry can’t be beat. We know offline streaming is important to our viewers, and we’re working to bring this feature to the platform in 2017 so that fans can keep up with their favorite shows wherever they are.”

While it may be annoying that shows are becoming exclusive to specific sites, competition is healthy and usually forces better customer service. Fans will have to wait and see what is to come from Amazon Anime Strike and Crunchyroll.