VRV

» see vrv.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the pitch was a cable package with the cable taken out. you paid once and got a shelf of separate channels inside one app, each with its own logo and its own crowd, and you could bolt a couple more on for a few dollars if you wanted them. anybody who has ever read a digiturk or d-smart lineup knows the shape of that offer. the difference is that vrv assembled its shelf out of internet-native brands rather than broadcasters, and aimed the whole thing at people who were about twenty.

it opened on 14 november 2016, built by ellation, the company that also ran crunchyroll. ellation sat inside otter media, which belonged to at&t and the chernin group, so this was american telecom money looking for somewhere to park a young audience it could not otherwise reach. nine dollars ninety-nine a month bought the base bundle.

the lineup was the product. crunchyroll carried the anime simulcasts and rooster teeth carried the web animation crowd. around those two sat a rotating set of smaller ones: shudder for horror, hidive for the anime crunchyroll did not have, cartoon hangover, mondo, a nicksplat channel for people who had been children in 1994.

there is no cultural distance to describe here, only a commercial one. vrv never sold outside the united states in six and a half years. i could not have subscribed if i had wanted to, and neither could anybody else on this continent.

~ the case file ~

~ the ones that left ~

a bundle is only worth what is inside it, and vrv did not own most of what was inside it. funimation walked out on 9 november 2018 when sony pulled it away from the crunchyroll partnership. shudder went on 1 august 2019. nickrewind followed on 29 august 2020, hidive on 30 september 2021, and rooster teeth, the second-biggest name on the shelf, on 13 december 2021.

every one of those departures was somebody deciding they would rather have their own app and their own subscriber list. that was the industry's whole direction in those years. by the end vrv was a bundle in name with one significant channel still in it, which is a description of crunchyroll with extra steps.

~ the first of march ~

sony finished buying crunchyroll from at&t in august 2021 for a bit over a billion dollars, which meant one company now owned funimation, wakanim and vrv along with it. on 1 march 2022 it announced the obvious conclusion: all of them would be consolidated into crunchyroll, which had the largest name and the clearest identity.

that announcement was the death notice for three products at once, and it took a year and a half to work through them. vrv was the second to go.

~ the actual end ~

subscriptions rolled over to crunchyroll on 3 april 2023, with credits and gift card balances carried across and an account-linking tool for watch history. the site and the apps stopped answering on 3 may. wikipedia records the dissolution as 29 april, which is when the last content came off, so depending on which event you count the service died twice in five weeks.

not everything made the move. vrv select and the mondo catalog were simply not part of crunchyroll and did not reappear anywhere, which is the usual fate of the smallest tenant when a building changes hands. vrv.co now sends you to crunchyroll without comment.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »