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Originally Posted by Last Sinner
Kind of confused that if they're willing to ship manga overseas that they won't do anime unless they're that keen to end physical distribution ASAP.
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I always assumed the anime restriction had something to do with their heritage as Funimation, which only technically ever owned the US/Canada DVD/BD distribution rights, but third-party resellers like RightStuf just shipped things anywhere regardless (since, before, it wasn't RightStuf's responsibility to enforce Funimation's territorial rights). But now that Crunchyroll is Funimation, it'd be like Funimation is competing with local market distributors, and so now that RightStuf is Crunchyroll (is Funimation) they probably have to keep the same separation. Funimation doesn't distribute manga, so Crunchyroll distributing stuff from third-party publishers isn't the same kind of "conflict of interest."
Technically maybe they could have distributed non-Funimation anime globally, and Funimation stuff only within their territory, but probably that'd be very weird to customers, so probably easier to just be consistent and stay out of it.
It does seem like an opportunity for someone else to pick up the slack for that market, but yeah -- I wonder how much money there is left in this tiny niche these days.