Daisuki Aims to Aggregate (Legal) Streaming Anime in One Site

Website to launch in April with plans to expand on consoles, tablets, and cell phones

President and CEO Kunihiko Shibata outlined plans for the anime streaming service Daisuki in an interview with Anime News Network staff on Saturday. Shibata stated Daisuki will aggregate popular anime titles currently available on multiple platforms in one place. Announced titles for Daisuki include Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Mobile Suit Gundam, One Piece, Lupin the 3rd, and Prince of Tennis. These series are available separately on various streaming websites such as Crunchyroll, Funimation, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu, and Viz Media. Daisuki will bring these titles to one spot for the audience.

"Well, for example, you can watch One Piece on Funimation," Shibata said. "You can watch [Madoka Magica] on Crunchyroll. You can see each show at a certain website, but fans don't want to take the trouble to look at a lot of different websites. It's not exclusive, but you can see all the shows on Daisuki."

Shibata stressed that the company is looking to work side by side with Funimation and Crunchyroll, and Daisuki has no plans to pull series' licenses from those websites.

Daisuki is made up of Japanese anime studios and production companies Aniplex, Sunrise, Toei Animation, TMS Entertainment, Nihon Ad Systems (NAS), Dentsu, and Asatsu-DK (ADK). Services will launch in April on the web, with plans to expand to tablets, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, and cell phones. Initially, the site will only offer titles owned by its shareholders, but may work with other studios to stream content in the future. Daisuki also plans to stream anime titles nearly simultaneously with their Japanese broadcasts, as well as live events, and also plans to sell anime tie-in goods on the website.