JUNE 19, 2025

Welcome back to Buffering, and thanks to my colleagues Savannah Salazar and Eric Vilas-Boas for covering the breaking news about Warner Bros. Discovery consciously uncoupling itself while I was off last week. My only thought on the matter: In retrospect, we should’ve known this was coming when David Zaslav canceled plans to shut down the Discovery+ app and kept it around as a lower-cost option for the millions of consumers who have no use for The White Lotus and reruns of Friends. The move was sold as a win for consumer choice, but what it also did was make sure that the full Discovery content library would have an established streaming home in the event WBD’s strategy ever changed. It was a good call.

As for this week’s newsletter, Eric is back with a story that was going to run last week but got delayed by the WBD news: a look at the growing power of anime in the streaming world. I’ve also got some thoughts on Nielsen’s new data showing streaming now accounts for a bigger share of TV viewing than linear networks. Thanks for reading, and hope your Juneteenth is a good one

—Joe Adalian, Vulture's West Coast editor

By Eric Vilas-Boas

Solo Leveling, one of the biggest anime of 2024. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: A-1 Pictures

Over the last several years, anime forums have made an informal tradition of gleefully resurfacing a Wall Street Journal headline from 1999: “Kids Are Glued to a Violent Cartoon Show,” which wrung its hands over the “brutality” of Dragon Ball Z while pointing out its record viewership for Cartoon Network and its action block, Toonami. Jason DeMarco, a Toonami co-creator, remembers it left a sour taste with his team, who had never gotten that sort of press attention before. “We were just excited to talk about the show. They didn’t ask us any questions about the violence,” he tells Buffering. “We were very angry.”

So they fired back, in their own way: “We made a promo where we took a bunch of different reviews and quoted that one out of context and just said, ‘Kids are glued!’”

More than a quarter-century later, anime’s popularity has exploded, especially with younger audiences. The generation born after Pokémon’s debut has more anime at their fingertips than ever before, with streaming research firm Parrot Analytics estimating that average U.S. demand for the segment grew 176 percent between 2019 and 2024, fueled in part by surges in casual viewers and newcomers. In that same period, the number of total anime TV shows tripled. Despite the fact that its fanbase skews heavily toward young male viewers, a global survey commissioned by Crunchyroll, conducted by National Research Group (NRG), and released last month argues it’s “no longer a niche interest.”

The survey numbers are compelling. Of the 29,000 respondents responding from seven markets (U.S., U.K., India, Germany, France, Brazil, and Mexico), 44 percent identified as anime fans, beating out other categories like K-dramas and Bollywood. Gen-Zers (ages 13 to 28) are unsurprisingly more into it than millennials (ages 29 to 44) and Gen-Xers (ages 45 to 54) are: 54 percent of Gen-Z respondents say they love anime — more than Megan Thee Stallion (who has her own anime in the works), Addison Rae, BTS, Bad Bunny, Pedro Pascal, the Kardashians, WWE, and the NFL. The three age cohorts also differ in why and how they watch the medium. Crunchyroll COO Gita Rebbapragada says the survey was meant to “put data around what we see qualitatively with our fans,” adding to the insights Crunchyroll collects from its own streaming service.

Anime’s popularity and revenue haven’t slowed, even as the entertainment industry at large has contracted in the wake of Hollywood strikes, a yearslong pandemic hangover, and the retreat of streaming dollars. The industry in Japan may be run on underpaid workers and harrowing labor issues, but globally, anime content generates about $20 billion in annual profits. Warner Bros. Discovery has helped produce and debut several anime titles through Adult Swim, Max, Hulu, and Crunchyroll in recent years, despite animation woes elsewhere in the company. (What will happen once the dust settles on its spinoff is unclear.) And Crunchyroll’s doing pretty well, having recently hit 17 million subscribers in May in part on the strength of its singular focus on the category. “We’ve continued to grow, and I think that’s largely because anime has continued to grow,” says Rebbapragada. “It is one of the fastest-growing sectors of entertainment.”

If you work at a streaming service in 2025, you have an anime strategy. “There will be a portion of younger streaming audiences that expect to see some amount of anime on a service for them to be even slightly interested in it,” says DeMarco, who is now a senior vice-president of anime, action series, and long-form content for Adult Swim and Warner Bros. Animation.

Netflix is still very much in the game, licensing, simulcasting, and dubbing marquee titles like Dragon Ball Daima and Dandadan. Several of WBD’s co-produced anime titles like Lazarus and Ninja Kamui have broken through the monotony of David Zaslav’s shrinking animation portfolio, insulated for now by their older-skewing appeal on HBO Max. At Disney, Hulu’s anime library remains prodigious, anchored by classics like Cowboy Bebop and Dragon Ball as well as newer hits like Fire Force and Blue Lock. The films of acclaimed directors Makoto Shinkai and Masaaki Yuasa have rotated onto the Criterion Channel in recent months. Then there’s the anime-specific services; Crunchyroll is on top and may have swallowed Funimation a few years ago, but smaller services like RetroCrush and HiDive remain in play, as do FAST channels devoted to titles like Naruto, Hunter x Hunter, and Sailor Moon. As Dave Jesteadt, president of anime film distributor GKIDS told us in February: “Streaming and digital are where these films have the majority of their life cycles.”

Unlike their live-action counterparts, buzzy new anime titles are often available across at least a couple different services, “something that was kind of unthinkable even five years ago,” DeMarco says. He’s used the same strategy on several shows he’s produced: Suicide Squad Isekai went to Hulu and Max, as did FLCL Shoegaze and Grunge (in addition to Crunchyroll), while Lazarus appears on Max and other platforms internationally. The first three episodes of Dandadan, one of 2024’s splashiest debuts, were released theatrically by GKIDS as a film in May, then dropped weekly on both Netflix and Crunchyroll. “That’s a function of the maturity of the market,” DeMarco says. “Most of the streamers who lived and died by the exclusivity thing realized that with anime, exposure is oftentimes more important. You just want to make it easier to find.”

Making the content easily accessible also makes it less enticing to steal. For decades, most anime titles never made it overseas to the U.S., at least not legally. The “fansubbing,” VHS-swapping, and eventually linksharing of illegally sourced series and films was and remains a part of anime culture. Crunchyroll itself was launched as a pirating site before going legit. Most viewers these days prefer the legal access of paid streaming services, with Gen-X fans the most averse to piracy, but it’s still a massive problem, enough that the Japanese government has worked to crack down on pirates in recent years.

“Piracy is an issue everywhere, but there is a disproportionate consumption of anime and manga in these communities,” says Rebbapragada. The single largest anime-piracy site, HiAnime, hit 364 million monthly visits last October, 21 million more than Disney+ notched in the same month, according to data from SimilarWeb. “Anime is very much over-indexing,” says Katerina Naddaf, a senior analyst with Parrot Analytics who’s also researched anime fans’ streaming patterns and whose models factor piracy into the demand. “Usually we see those patterns when there’s a lack of streaming availability,” she says. “It can also be a timing thing; by the time it gets licensed to a given platform, people want to get ahead of it.”

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Then there’s the lingering misunderstanding that anime can be boiled down to any one genre or segment, like the “violent cartoons” stigma or Pokémonassociations. In the past, anime fans had to battle the misconception that the category was suitable for “boys only” while nowadays, 44 percent of teen anime fans are girls, per the Crunchyroll survey. Fifty-nine percent of fans in the U.S. want to see more racial diversity among protagonists, 44 percent want to see stronger female leads, and 16 percent want to see more LGBTQ+ visibility. And when the majority of the anime produced are adaptations of existing IP geared toward the young male demographic, meeting audience demands is easier said than done.

And for streamers, presenting that content on a platform in an organic and differentiated way comes with its own hurdles. Globally premiering a new show canmean negotiating between the creatives and studio partners behind the title, the U.S. streamer, and the distribution partners or other streamers in Japan — then making a series of decisions around when and how it should be dubbed or otherwise localized. DeMarco points to the case of Lazarus as one that caused some literal headaches: Broadcast versions of an episode had to be tweaked after its streaming debut to pass the Harding test for flashing lights and photosensitivity. Some fans took the changes to mean that different cuts of the show were being released, fueling a piracy push. “It ended up hurting us,” DeMarco says. “We found a happy medium now, but it’s a lot of trial and error.”

Curating anime on your service is another beast entirely. Most of the big streamers, like Netflix, relegate it to a category link, and only occasionally do much more. (Last month was “Ani-May,” according to Plex, Pluto TV, and Crunchyroll, and probably others we missed.) Crunchyroll devotes its whole website to selling its audience on not just streaming shows, but a whole anime-loving lifestyle, through an online store stuffed with games, merch, collectors’ Blu-rays, and other physical media. Crunchyroll’s AMC Networks–owned competitor, HiDive, does the same, through its Sentai Filmworks store. Both of them are attempts to capitalize on a finding from Crunchyroll and NRG’s study, that 88 percent of teen fans consider anime not just shows they enjoy but an important part of their identity. “Rather than branching out to other types of content, they tend to stay deeply engaged with a wide range of anime titles,” says Naddaf. “It’s a deeply loyal fan base.”

The piracy woes and the concern over who anime fans are in 2025 and what they want underscore just how globalized the anime market has become. “Travel-ability” has been the key to the sector’s success, says Naddaf. There’s an understanding that though a show may be made for a Japanese audience first, the right show has the potential to be an even bigger hit overseas. Rebbapragada says Crunchyroll is “acutely aware” that it wants to produce anime that is “regionally relevant” to the various markets they operate in.

“Regionally relevant” can mean a few different things, from cultural nuance to localization history. At WBD, DeMarco focuses on international co-productions that ideally have a shot at success in both markets, with a focus on the West, as that’s where WBD is based. At Crunchyroll, the recent soccer anime Blue Lock, Rebbapragada says, took off in Latin America and parts of Europe, regions that go wild for football, as opposed to American football. The older catalogue title Death Note is very popular in India. “Some of it is nostalgia from access that certain territories had. Some of it is just the themes culturally hit,” she says.

Other times, a cocktail of regional relevance and audience connection can lead to a breakout. One of last year’s biggest new anime, Solo Leveling, was adapted from a Korean webtoon and crafted with story arcs and a premise — the protagonist must “level up” his stats as a monster hunter — inspired by role-playing games. The “flawed hero” trope, always a popular theme, was there, Rebbapragada says, but there was something more to it: “With younger audiences, when they’re not watching anime, much of that time is spent gaming.”

A new Nielsen report shows why legacy media had to join the streaming wars.

By Joe Adalian

It finally happened: For the first time ever, Nielsen says streaming commanded a bigger share of American viewing time than all linear television networks (broadcast and cable) combined for an entire month. The ratings giant says streamers accounted for 44.8 percent of all viewership in May, just edging out linear’s audience share of 44.2 percent, which was divided between cable (24.1 percent) and broadcast (20.1 percent). As expected as this development was, it nonetheless marks a milestone in the ongoing transition to digital television — while underscoring why Bob Iger made the right call eight years ago this summer when he announced he was pulling the Disney’s programming from Netflix in order to launch what would become Disney+. 

It would be wrong to characterize Iger’s 2017 decision as controversial or, for that matter, particularly visionary: Even then, there was already a general understanding of what sort of threat streaming in general, and Netflix in particular, posed to legacy media companies. And if we’re talking visionaries, it’s Reed Hastings who’s getting his own wing at the Museum of Streaming History. But Iger’s play was still a very risky move because Disney was giving up a sure thing (lots of licensing revenue from Netflix) in order to build a streaming business at a time when experts disagreed on exactly how long the shift from traditional to TV to streaming would take, and about how quickly the cable bundle would collapse as audiences cut the cord. Iger also had no idea whether his fellow linear powers would follow him down the direct-to-consumer path. As the analysts at MoffettNathson wrote in a report at the time of Iger’s 2017 announcement, “Rarely has a company willingly created this much financial disruption in strategically pivoting to a new business model.” 

And indeed, the streaming wars of the past eight years have been super messy — filled with countless errors, thousands of layoff notices, and billions in debt. Nobody, not even Iger, would argue that he or his peers at other platforms have performed the direct-to-consumer digital dance flawlessly. Stripping so many basic cable networks of first-run scripted content while also reducing the number of unscripted originals — essentially turning them into zombie channels — has caused cable TV to decline nearly twice as quickly as broadcast since 2021. Things didn’t have to get so bad so quickly.

But the speed with which consumers have flocked to streaming is proof that Iger was still right to rip the bandage off when he did (and, quite frankly, he probably should have done so a few years earlier). Consider: When Nielsen first started regularly reporting on streaming’s share of viewing time exactly four years ago — about 12 to 18 months after Disney+, Max, and Peacock all rolled out — streaming represented barely one-fourth (26 percent) of viewing time, while linear TV was still at 64 percent. Since then, streaming’s share of viewing time has grown a whopping 71 percent, even as so much about streaming (higher prices, more ads, less original content) has gotten worse. Obviously the aforementioned cable collapse made it easier for the Netflixes and YouTubes of the world to grab audience share. But no amount of wishcasting was going to change the fact that TV’s future was streaming.

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