It was recently announced that Anime Strike, Amazon’s anime streaming service, has officially been shut down. The streaming service didn’t even last a year, premiering on Amazon on January 12th, 2017, due to fans complaining about the service from the very beginning.
Anime Strike was one of Amazon’s “channels.” These channels were additional streaming services in addition to the Amazon Prime membership. Anime fans were obviously furious when they realized subscribing to Anime Strike would be an additional $60 a year on top of $99 a year for the mandatory Amazon Prime membership. Other channels included Heera, a streaming service that specializes in Bollywood content.
However, on Friday, fans of both services, Anime Strike and Heera, were pleased to see that the niche content of the channels were available through Amazon Prime Video. Animes that had previously been marked as “Anime Strike Exclusives” were marked with Prime banners instead. A spokesperson from Amazon stated, “We have decided to move the curated catalogs of Anime Strike and Heera into Prime Video so that more customers can enjoy this content as part of their Prime membership.”
Users of the streaming service have seen its cancellation coming for some time. Last summer, the anime streaming service stopped updating their social media pages. Their Twitter page has even been shut down since the news of its cancellation. Amazon was doing such a poor job of promoting their animes that the anime and manga publishers had to promote their own shows. Amazon also failed to announce any anime exclusives for the winter 2018 anime season.
Subscribers to the service will automatically be dropped from the extra subscription and will be refunded for anything they were charged after January 5th.
Are you celebrating along with the majority of other anime fans? Let us know in the comments below, and keep an eye on The Nerd Stash for all of your anime news!
