Animax Plus

» see animax.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

German-speaking anime fans got a channel of their own on 5 June 2007. It was on cable, it was Sony's, and if you lived in North Rhine-Westphalia or Hesse and paid Unitymedia you could watch it that week. Nationwide carriage took another five years. Turkey never had anything like it at any point, so the Turkish version of the same fandom ran on fansubs and forum threads the whole time, which is a different relationship with a show than having it on a channel number you can find by accident.

The name has a longer history than the German service does. Sony set Animax up in Japan on 20 May 1998 and started broadcasting there that June, and the brand was franchised outward across Asia and then the rest of the world over the following decade. The German operation was one of the later ones and one of the last to close. Latin America lost its Animax in 2011, the UK lost its video-on-demand version in 2018.

What makes the German arc worth recording is that it died twice and only the second one counts. On 1 July 2016 Animax stopped being a television channel, which is usually where a grave gets written. Instead it turned into a video-on-demand product sold through Vodafone and Amazon, and from January 2018 it ran on Amazon Channels as Animax Plus, an anime library you subscribed to inside somebody else's storefront. That is the thing that shut down in 2022.

~ the dossier ~

~ the cable years ~

The linear channel behaved the way a niche channel with rent to pay behaves. From 8 September 2010 it started scheduling non-Japanese animation alongside the anime, which is the small betrayal every specialist channel eventually commits. The same year it turned up on the PlayStation 3, because Sony owned both ends of that pipe. By the time it reached the whole of Germany in September 2012, its real competition was a generation who had already learned to get their subtitles off the internet and were not going to unlearn it for a cable package.

~ what came after ~

Sony bought Crunchyroll from AT&T and then spent 2022 pulling its other anime holdings into it. Funimation went first and Animax was folded in on the German-speaking side, with Wakanim following later. The announcement came in March 2022 and the catalog transfer finished over the summer. Sword Art Online and Demon Slayer's first season ended up on Crunchyroll, along with the Fate/stay night Heaven's Feel films, which is most of what anyone was paying Animax Plus for.

The closing statement came from Carsten Fink, a Sony Pictures vice president for distribution, thanking partners and the Animax team for the energy and expertise they had brought since launch. It said nothing about how large the audience was, because nobody at Sony ever said. Fifteen years of a German anime channel and the subscriber number is not in any public document.

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