Japanese animated television series have been getting more popular over the last few years. With titles like Dragon Ball Z, Attack On Titan, Fairy Tail, One Piece, Tokyo Ghoul and Space Dandy, fans are flocking to streaming services all over the place to catch the latest episodes. According to an announcement from Funimation Entertainment, there will be a new streaming service available this year where you can catch all of your favorite anime shows in one place.
The announcement came from the Consumer Electronics Show this week and it was there that fans were able to find out where they will be able to watch shows like, Attack On Titan and whether or not it will be an ad-free service. According to the company, it will be an ad-free service that is partnered up with Sony DADC New Media Solutions. Funimation Entertainment is the main source for anime shows in the United States and the United Kingdom.
According to the announcement, the streaming service will start in February of this year in the United States and United Kingdom with a full slate of new shows, including the ones listed above. For the most part, these types of shows were very hard to come by on or offline, but now fans will be able to find them all in one place. In the past, it was common for the shows to appear on Netflix for a few weeks, only to be removed before you could see all of the episodes listed on the streaming service.
Funimation Entertainment is not going to be the only place that you can find these shows, however. The company’s main competitor is CrunchyRoll, which provides a similar, subscription based service for the shows, much like Netflix. Popular shows on that service include Bleach, Sword Art Online and Naruto Shippuden. All of those shows were left out of the release notes from Funimation Entertainment. Over the years, Funimation has been the leader in DVD sales when it comes to anime shows like Dragon Ball Z.
The DVD and Blu-ray sales have doubled since 2013, according to at least one source. That jump in sales took the DVD and Blu-ray sales from the basement and gave those hope as they watched the numbers climb once again. Funimation has been partnered up with Universal Pictures Home Entertainment for disc distributions. One of the main features that Funimation talked about during the Consumer Electronics Show was the fact that fans will be able to stream the service through an Android, iOS or Kindle device, making the service even more convenient for consumers. Those apps are added to the list of apps for Apple TV, Fire TV and the Windows 10 universal app.