AnimeLab

» see animelab.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

AnimeLab was two countries wide, and not out of modesty. Anime streaming rights are sold by territory, one show at a time, and Madman Entertainment in Melbourne held Australia and New Zealand. So the service it built in 2014 checked your ip address and told everyone else to go away. From anywhere outside those two countries AnimeLab was a geoblock with a logo on it.

It launched as a beta on 28 May 2014, replacing something Madman had called the Screening Room, with over fifty series and more than seven hundred episodes. During the beta it streamed everything free and without advertising, which was less generosity than a way of finding out whether the pipes held. On 26 May 2015 it came out of beta with a paid tier and kept the free ad-supported one, and that free tier is most of why people in the region remember it fondly: you did not have to decide anything to start watching.

The simulcast is the part that mattered. Before services like this, an anime that aired in Japan on a Thursday reached Australia either through a fansub group within a day or through a licensed dvd release within two years, and everyone knew which one they were actually using. AnimeLab compressed that to hours, legally. In Turkey we never got the licensed half of that deal at all, and the fansub half was the whole story for far longer.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two countries wide ~

The catalog grew the way regional licensing forces catalogs to grow, one negotiation at a time. On 4 September 2014 Siren Visual, another local distributor, agreed to put its titles on it, which meant the service now carried shows Madman did not own. That is unremarkable until you notice how rare it is: two rights holders in a small market deciding that one shared shop front beat two half-empty ones.

Then Sony started buying. In September 2019 Sony and Aniplex consolidated Madman Anime Group, France's Wakanim and America's Funimation into a single joint venture. In March 2020 Funimation withdrew from Australia and New Zealand entirely and moved its content onto AnimeLab, which for about a year made AnimeLab the strongest version of itself it would ever be. That was also the last independent thing about it.

~ what it became ~

The rebrand was announced on 9 June 2021 for a 17 June switchover, then quietly pushed back twice, and on 3 November Funimation confirmed 9 December 2021. On that day the site and the apps became Funimation ANZ. Accounts carried over and the catalog got bigger, and the local support team stayed on. Nothing was taken away except the name and the interface people had used for seven years, which they were told was a small thing and did not experience as one.

The joke arrives two years later. In March 2022 Funimation Global Group was renamed Crunchyroll, and on 2 April 2024 Funimation itself was switched off and its catalog moved again. So AnimeLab was killed to consolidate onto a brand that had itself been marked for deletion before the migration finished. Load animelab.com in 2026 and it sends you to crunchyroll.com in one hop, skipping the intermediate corpse entirely.

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