Crunchyroll Brought Back ‘Appointment Viewing’ for Gen Z With a Popular Spring 2024 Anime
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Crunchyroll is continuing to pave the way for the entertainment industry thanks to its continued success as an anime streaming service and production company. However, one of the most popular anime TV series of the Spring 2024 season helped the anime giant do the impossible by growing its Gen Z audience with “appointment-viewing” programming.
According to The Wrap, the simultaneous worldwide streaming premiere of Kaiju No. 8 propelled Crunchyroll’s viewing numbers with its already younger-skewing subscribers, at a time when major TV networks and streaming services are currently struggling to find new audiences or retain their current viewers. “What we actually have seen that anime has done is bring back appointment viewing,” Gita Rebbapragada, Crunchyroll’s chief operating officer, said during the Television Critics Association’s 2024 summer tour. “[Anime is] actually very correlated to the Japanese broadcast schedule, so we’ll see appointment viewing for an episode of an anime that is super exciting and highly anticipated.”
Although English releases for new anime episodes typically arrive within a tight timeframe of the show’s broadcast premiere in Japan, Crunchyroll used Kaiju No. 8 as an experiment to see if a simultaneous streaming premiere worldwide would bring in higher numbers. As the episode premieres for Kaiju No. 8 were rolled out at the same time as the Japanese broadcast premieres in multiple languages, viewership for the Shonen Jump anime adaptation grew from April to late June. Now, Crunchyroll is releasing more new anime episodes in line with their Japanese broadcasts.
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