Being the
largest anime platform in the world comes with a very high price tag, and Crunchyroll is
about to pay for it with European bureaucracy. The UK government
has just classified the orange giant in the dreaded "Tier 1" category
of streaming services (along with monsters such as Netflix and
Disney+). What does this mean? That from April 2026, the platform will have to
submit to the draconian rules of the Online Safety Act 2023, a law
designed to "protect" users, but which smells of censorship from
miles away.
Filters,
blockages and the fear of scissors
New British
law requires platforms to protect under-18s from "harmful content."
In the anime world, where blood, gore, and dark themes are the
bread and butter, this is a red flag. Visceral works such as Chainsaw
Man or Attack on Titan are in the crosshairs. To
avoid catastrophic fines that could reach 5% of its global revenue (or up to
£250,000), Crunchyroll will have to implement extremely strict age verification
systems or, in the worst case, apply regional cuts and blocks to its catalog
of explicit content.
The irony
of the situation is that the direct competition is laughing from the stands.
Smaller platforms like HIDIVE managed to dodge this government
bullet simply because they don't pass the threshold of 500,000 active users in
the UK. The massive success of Crunchyroll (with more than 5.5 billion hours of
viewing in British territory) was exactly what put it in this legal cage.
The
logistical nightmare of accessibility
As if it
wasn't enough to have the government review whether an anime is "too
violent," the law also imposes mandatory accessibility quotas.
Crunchyroll will be required to ensure that 80% of its catalog has descriptive
captions for deaf people (something they already master, thankfully), but they
also require 10% with audio descriptions for blind people and 5% with sign
language. Translating and adapting thousands of hours of Japanese anime into
these formats is going to be a monumental logistical and financial headache.
Although
these rules initially apply only to the British territory, the global fandom is
already breaking out in a cold sweat, fearing that Crunchyroll will decide to
apply a "smoothed" version of its platform globally to save itself
legal problems in the future. The grace period ends in 2027, at which point the
rules will be absolute.
