YouSaid · the spoken record

Rahul Purini

lines on the record: 83
first: 2024-02-26
most recent: 2024-02-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Am going to talk about the history of Country Rule here. I have a timeline that our producers prepared for me open on my screen. It is a full screen document on my 27 inch display. It is just a lot. The history of this company stretches back to 1994 with the launch of a service called Funimation, which existed just to license Dragon Ball Z. Crunchyroll was a user-generated content site for a minute. There were some piracy concerns. It merged. AT&T is in the mix for the hot minute. They're gone. Sony buys Fondimation, and then they buy the rest of Crunch World. There's a very complicated M&8 story in there. I'm just making it as simple as I can. You get promoted to president in 2022, 2023, you launch your free linear channel. There's a lot going on there in the background, right? Like just a lot of M&A activity, a lot of different corporate cultures showing up and disappearing. A lot of literal corporations disappearing.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the functional teams are our biggest team, so our product and engineering team given that majority of our touch points with our fans are digital in nature. That's our biggest team, about a third of the company, our localization teams, because we are Not only just taking this content with the Japanese audio and subtitling into 10 plus languages, we are also dubbing it into 10 plus languages. And so we have teams that are focused on localizing, and we do that in-house for most of our territory. That's another big theme. Our business groups are fairly focused teams, so they're not the biggest of the teams within the organization, but they bring the focus that we need them to bring for each of those touch points”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how do we bring it to life in each of our business groups, if you will? So obviously, it'll start with streaming, but then if you are thinking about consumer product goods or e-commerce or games, they become the continuity. They become that centerpiece that manages the IP throughout the life of that. That gives us that consistency to ensure that we are treating that IP in the way that our partners would like to be handled.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And actually, the other thing that I would add to that complexity for us specifically is we work with our Japanese partners and the way The moral laws are structured in Japan, the Japanese creators have a lot of control in how their IP is distributed, marketed, and things like that. So we have a lot of work that we have to do where we have to go to our creators in Japan and get approvals for marketing campaigns, assets we create, and things like that. So that creates another set of complexity. So what we've done is we've created a team we call brand management team, where it's a team that's focused on managing an IP or a title across its life cycle. So they get involved. There's one or more individuals assigned to each IP whose job it is to understand the content, build the relationship with our partner in Japan, and then come up with the strategy on which cohort of audience within our overall audience does this show appeal to? How do we market it? And how do we market it across each of the channels?”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think this is for an entertainment company one of the hardest kinds of questions to answer because you take one piece of IP, that's the core. It's a show or a movie and there's one team, the streaming team sort of is going to go find it. They're going to buy it. They're going to bring it to the audience. They're going to market it. But then to extend it to merch or any of the other, some other team is going to show up and do something else with it. How do you maintain sort of the quality, the soul of the actual work as all these different teams in different regions sort of run with it in different ways?”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In each of the regions are focused on serving audiences in each of the regions, but report into the global groups. We're not structured by region. We don't have P&Ls by region. We have one organization that's a global organization, and these teams manage businesses globally with team members in each of the region.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go back to what I said, which is at the core we want to be a company that is focused on being everything for that anime fan. So we've structured the company on that principle, right? So we have business units or lines of businesses that are focused on creating these experiences for fans. So those are groups of people that are focused on those unique experiences. So we have a team that's focused on streaming, a team that's focused on games, e-commerce, the article. And then we have functional teams that go horizontally supporting all of those lines of business or business units. That creates a matrix organization for us where we have business units that are focused on those consumer experience. And then we have functional groups that are focused on supporting those business units across horizontally. And that structure extends globally for us. We have teams.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We actually announced that CES that we are past 13 million paying subscribers. There you go. So like I said, the TAM is huge. It's over 800 million people across the world outside of China. And Japan, every time I've estimated what the size of this business could be over the last eight years, I've underestimated it. So we think there is definitely potential for several times more in terms of paying subscribers globally. We are focused on making sure that we grow this globally. So I think multiple times where we are right now.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We absolutely do in all our conversations with our partners, for example, Netflix launched One Piece live action, which is a live-action TV series that was based on a popular anime show. And we definitely saw fans coming to Country Role to watch the One Piece anime. And we see that not just from other streaming services, we see that when we launch games or when we release a movie in theaters, it creates conversation within our audience that then drives them into the country roll ecosystem to watch those shows or adjacent shows or similar shows.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That something you think about in conversations with the Netflixes and the Amazons of the world? Not many people think of Netflix as the discovery platform for their service. It's usually the other way around. But is that how you think about it? Okay, Netflix will initiate an anime fan. And if they become a slightly more intense anime fan, they will arrive at Crunchy Roll.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Netflix is ubiquitous, right? Like they're in every household. The Gen Z audience obviously is watching anime on Netflix, but they're also watching anime on Crunchyroll, more so than any other demographic, like you said. Our value proposition to them is the depth and the breadth of content we are bringing to them. They get anime, great anime on Netflix that gets them interested in that. But if they want to go broader and deeper, watch a broader set of genre stories. Trunchy roll is the destination. That's what we are bringing to the table. So once you're a fan, a casual fan and you want it to try more, you come to Crunchy Roll. So that's why we also work with our partners that are in general entertainment that have broad reach, whether it is Netflix or Hulu or Amazon, to help reach this audience, engage them, and then”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Without fans for a longer period of time, add value in multiple ways, if you will. So those tend to be more an LTV play for us, so lifetime value, whereas if you think of subscription or games, they play both.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focused on reaching out to fans or consumers that are not aware of anime and introducing them to anime. That is maybe in the future, but today we are focused on taking this huge audience of anime aware anime interested fans and bringing them into our ecosystem. The flywheel place, there's different components of the flywheel play, different roles for us. Streaming and games, for example, play both the top of the funnel, meaning these are channels that bring new people into our ecosystem given just their size and reach they can play that role, but they also allow us to retain our subscribers and our fans in the ecosystem for a longer period of time. Whereas other channels like theatrical and e-commerce are ways for us to extend that connection with our customers.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, if you do a I got a piece of that. Absolutely. So right now, like I mentioned, there is a huge audience of existing anime fans, right? So what we are focused on is making sure that those anime fans know about Crunchy Roll, can engage with their fandom and experience anime within our ecosystem. So that's our first priority and our sole focus, if you will. We're not.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Streaming business is our single biggest touchpoint back to our fans, but it is one component of what we call our flywheel approach. Like I said earlier, our entire emphasis is making sure that we are providing amazing experiences for our fans across their fandom, that all of those touch points. So streaming is a biggest part of that, but we also are into games. So we bring games that are based on anime IP or anime style to our fans. We have an e-commerce business where fans that are collectors or want to buy stuff that is from their favorite show, we have the opportunity to do that. We're into theatrical, so we bring movies to theaters across the globe for our fans to experience their favorite shows on big screen with friends and family. We are into consumer product goods and collectibles as well. So yeah, we are a full media and entertainment business serving our fans across the all the channels that they would like.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a pretty good sense of what you're trying to accomplish. You're trying to bring stories to a certain class of creators, and you're trying to take the anime that they make out to the world. That feels like the main business, right? Streaming video and the sort of inputs and outputs of streaming video. Is that what Crunch Rule is? You described it as a median entertainment company. Do you have other businesses, or is that the main one?”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is definitely something we pay a lot of attention to. We definitely believe that anime fans globally want to experience stories that are from across the globe. That is one of the biggest things that attracts them to anime is the diversity of the stories, the diversity of the genres. So we do believe in taking stories that are global and producing anime out of it, but doing it in a certain way that they're still authentically anime. So we work with creators and even with IP holders so that the IP could be presented in such a way that it is still authentic to the original story, but also authentic to how anime creators would tell the story. So our producers are very focused on making sure that that authenticity still comes through.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's amazing, right? That is globalized in sway, right? You go find a Korean IP, you have an audience for it somewhere else, you bring it into a Japanese studio. You talked at the beginning about fans really appreciating the inherent Japanese quality of the work. Do you have any safeguards against okay? This process might actually make this less Japanese, like less like the thing that our customers are asking for.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, there's a show that we just launched in January called Solo Leveling. It's a show based on a Korean manba. And so our team read the manva liked the IP. And so we actually took it to our partners in Japan, one of our sister companies actually Anaplax, and produced, co-produced the show with them. We announced the show about a year and a half ago, and we released it in January to, and it's been really well received by fans across the world. And so that's one example where we co-produced a show that we brought to the table based on what we were hearing from our fans.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might not be something our partners might be able to create and produce primarily for the Japanese audience. So we step in and invest with our partners because this might be something that we believe strongly for our audience internationally. And so we take that step and co-produce with our partners.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So, one of our value exchange with the creators in Japan, what we commit to do that we uniquely bring to them is that data back, right? So we have over the last 25 years, 28 years, depending on which company have built relationships with fans in these regions across the world. And while anime fans have a lot of similarities across the globe, their preferences, what they watch, how they watch is slightly different in each region. And that's the data that we spend every day understanding, drawing insights from and taking those back to our creative partners in Japan, either influencing what shows they tell, how they tell those stories, and or sometimes what we are investing in and co-producing with our partners in Japan, because sometimes certain stones”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Relationship makes sense on the export side, right? There's a culture of creators in Japan, you take their work, you pay them for it, you go and take it to the large audience outside of Japan in various ways, you meet those fans where they are. Does that go back the other way? Do the needs or wants of the fans of the United States come back to the Japanese creators as their influence in that direction?”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Advantage for us is there is so much opportunity for growth even just being focused on this and one cohort of audience if you will the anime fan. We have research that shows that there's about 800 million people that are anime aware, anime interested and watching anime outside of China and Japan. So that's a huge tam, right? So for us We feel like there's opportunity to grow and continue to grow, even being singularly focused on this audience. So we don't feel the pressure to expand. We say we don't want to be something for everyone. We want to be everything for someone. And that someone for us is the anime fan. So what we are focused on is making sure we serve that fan holistically across their touch points for their fandom.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially at scale, they tend to flatten everything. You're very specific. Like we're going to go buy animation in Japan, have a connection to those creators, and we're going to bring it over to this market. And that is a service we provide. Do you feel any pressure as you think about growth on that core conceit? Because most other platforms, they look at growth and then whatever that specificity is tends to go away in service of growth as fast as possible.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that's interesting with this, and I just want to poke at this a little bit, and then I want to talk about the actual structure of the company, which is fascinating. Most internet services are kind of inherently globalized. They are inherently sort of flattened culture. You look at the Spotify charts around the world and it's like a mishmash of different cultures coming together. Often American culture dominates in various countries around the world have strong feelings about that. But that's most platforms, right? They tend to be flat on the...”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A really important part of who we are. Like you mentioned, Cunchy Roll is a merger of several companies that we're all focused on this audience. All of them had one thing in common. They all had a really strong connection back to Japan and relationship back to the Japanese creative ecosystem in Japan. And we maintain that very much today. So we have a fairly long relationships with the creators in Japan. We have a big team in Japan that works with that creative ecosystem day in and out. We are an ex-Japan business, meaning we don't operate the service and our business in Japan because we have strong partnerships with partners that do that in Japan. But we have deep connections with that ecosystem and leverage that to bring anime to global audience.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For Country Roll itself, obviously there's a connection to so Crunch Rail is a long history that we should get into, but there's a connection to Sony. There's a connection to Japan. The company is built of mergers. There's quite a lot in the background of how Crunchel came to be as a company. Do you maintain a corporate connection to Japan itself? Is that a core part of the company's identity, or is it just we import Japanese animation to 12 ANP in the United States?”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way we think about anime, we believe it is something that is conceived and or created in Japan. And the reason we believe that is because when anime fans are asked why they gravitate towards anime, what makes it something so important for them, there are a lot of factors, but some of the few important things that they mention are connection back to Japanese pop culture, connection back to Japanese way of storytelling and the stories and the characters that the Japanese, the way the Japanese creators create and bring them to life. So for those reasons, we feel like for anime to be truly authentically anime, it has to have those things in it. And so that's why we believe either it being conceived or created in Japan is something that is important.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about that specific definition made in Japan seems like the most limiting piece of that puzzle, is that core to your definition of anime? Is that what the fans have decided it is? Where does that come from specifically?”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crunch at all is a media and entertainment company focused on serving a very particular audience, which is the anime fan. So anime for your audience is animation that's conceived and created in Japan. It is a very dynamic storytelling format and has something for every fan.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am very excited to talk to you. Crunch Roll is a very interesting streaming service. All the big streaming services are going through some kind of convulsion. There's something going on with the big streaming services. Crunchroll is very small, very focused on anime. It seems to be doing very well. I'm very curious how you've managed to position all of that. And I'm very curious where you think it's going. But I want to start at the basics. Explain to people what Crunchy Roll is.”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Means anything at all. Of course, I also had to ask Rahu about anime's tireless debate, subs. Okay, Country Earl President Raho Preini, here we go. Rahul Prani, you are the president of Crunchy Roll. Welcome to Decod”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilan Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Rahul Perini, the president of Crunchyroll, a streaming service focused entirely on anime. And really, the biggest anime service still going. Rahul has a long history with anime. He spent more than seven years at Funimation, a company that started in the 90s to distribute Dragon Ball Z to U.S. audiences before he got the top job at Crunchyroll. Anime might seem like niche content, but it's not nearly as niche as you might think. Our colleagues over at Polygon just ran a huge survey of anime viewers and found that 42% of Gen Z and 25% of millennials watch anime regularly. And Crunchero is growing with that audience. Like most entertainment providers, the service absolutely exploded during the pandemic, going from 5 million paying subscribers in 2021 to more than 13 million as of last month. But interestingly, Rahul says that”
2024-02-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT