Amazon Seems to Have Killed Its Anime Channel

As an Amazon Prime member, I was pretty annoyed at having to pay an extra fee to enjoy their anime offerings. Anime Strike was $5 a month on top of the annual charge for Prime, and I subscribed mostly for a few shows (Welcome to the Ballroom, Dive, and Princess Principal, pretty much). Now it seems that Amazon has killed off Anime Strike after less than a year, with no announcement or fanfare.

I just learned of this via a post on the anime subreddit, where someone linked to a tweet. The tweet is from a regular user and not the official Anime Strike Twitter, which seems to have vanished into the ether. The linked Twitter thread provides all of the proof, despite there seeming to be no official announcement – the channel itself has been gutted and there is an error when you try to access the channel via the app. Even before the official Anime Strike account shut down, it apparently hadn’t been posting since the summer, and fans began to be suspicious when there were no new titles announced for winter 2018.

An unnamed spokesperson for Amazon confirmed the channel’s closing to Forbes. “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.”

Yes, now all of the shows that were previous available only behind the double paywall of Anime Strike are now available through a regular Prime membership. No more having to pay an extra $60 a year for its exclusive anime content.

However, I would caution anyone who was an Anime Strike subscriber to manually cancel your subscription, as I did the moment I learned the channel had shut down. A couple of redditors had remarked that they were charged their subscription fee just yesterday, even though the channel was shutting down. I wasn’t set to be charged for another two weeks, but I wouldn’t put it past Amazon to “forget” and bill me anyway, so I figured I would rather be safe than sorry.

Please note that this affects US users only, since I believe Anime Strike was a US-only channel. I’m not sure what titles are available to Prime users from other countries.

Author: Jamie Sugah

Jamie has a BA in English with a focus in creative writing from The Ohio State University. She self-published her first novel, The Perils of Long Hair on a Windy Day, which is available through Amazon. She is currently an archivist and lives in New York City with her demon ninja vampire cat. She covers television, books, movies, anime, and conventions in the NYC area.

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