Last week I asked about considerations when consolidating streaming companies to provide the ultimate goal of a unified experience. While I picked on Apple TV and Netflix, a better example would be the anime world featuring Sony (which purchased Funimation in 2017) and Crunchyroll (from AT&T/Warner Media in 2021). Funimation had their own production house in addition to the streaming platform and Crunchyroll was the first mainstream streaming provider of anime content in the US.

From a business perspective the deal made a lot of sense. Sony wanted to expand distribution while AT&T wanted to get out of the media business.

However, we’re looking at what some of the technical considerations will be at play for something like this. Especially with the ultimate goal of a unified streaming service. I will note that this is more of my experience as the end user going through the process, tech experience, and an odd hobby of following copyright law going back to the DMCA.

The two easy things to pick out is the combining the users into a single pool/collection. Whether you have dedicated services querying the databases from each entity, or you combine the databases into a single new collection. There is the third possibility of having a fallback approach (going with company A to see if the user exists, and if not then fallback to company B), however if you have someone in both databases, which takes priority?

For these users, you may have things such as billing history (assuming they have a paid subscription) or forum posts if there is a community form for such things. However, more important is going to be the address and especially where they are connecting from.

One of the biggest business models with any media company is regional access. Part of it is due to the contracts negotiated for certain content and exclusivity, other parts is to time releases for bigger impact. However, in our case we care about the regional access and that goes towards the second consideration: the content.

Borrowing from the Crunchyroll example, before they came on the scene, the anime industry suffered from rampant bootlegging. This meant there was a lot of work to convince the industry to trust in a streaming service as Netflix and Hulu were fairly new at the time and anime was just gaining popularity (think Pokemon and Dragonball Z). A part of this work entailed setting up streaming rights solely for the US audience. Additionally, just like with Netflix, some shows will come and go based on the rights negotiated.

So if you have one catalog/database that supports multiple regions and another doesn’t, then that would be a consideration that should give you pause to combining everything into a single app, right?

What else can you think of?

cab