Amazon’s unpopular Anime Strike service has been officially been nixed but there is a surprising silver lining to this new development: Now, the many anime shows and movies originally offered exclusively on the service will be available to all Amazon Prime subscribers.
Originally, Prime subscribers were supposed to pay $5 per month (in addition to the $99 Amazon Prime annual subscription fee) to access the service’s many titles, which included popular shows like Inuyashiki and Princess Principal. But it seems like few anime fans were interested in paying the extra fee. The service was also only available in America, further limiting its subscription base.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the move to Kotaku.
“We have decided to move the curated catalogs of Anime Strike and [Bollywood channel] Heera into Prime Video so that more customers can enjoy this content as part of their Prime membership,” the spokesperson said.
On Twitter, many fans are rejoicing in the news of the death of Anime Strike.
THANK YOU DEVILMAN FOR KILLING ANIME STRIKE
— Yami ReiRei, JK (@LossThief) January 5, 2018
https://twitter.com/Pokemonfan1763/status/949399573499400192
When Anime Strike moves all their exclusives to Prime and you can legally those watch shows now: pic.twitter.com/2bT4MO7TBW
— Yolo the Unwise Wolf (@YoloUnwiseWolf) January 5, 2018
Everyone seems to agree that its only fair for Prime subscribers to access to the content they want without an additional paywall.