Crunchyroll plans to offer offline streaming in 2017

Although there's still something of a sour taste left in the mouth's of many from Amazon's entry into the aniem streaming market, specifically in North America where their new Anime Strike service locks series behind a double paywall of Amazon Prime subscription plus dedicated Anime Strike subscription.

However, one interesting move made by the service moves it into line with other elements of Amazon's Prime Instant Video service, that being the ability to download and effectively cache streaming episodes to make them available offline on mobile devices - a handy feature for anyone on the move or likely to be away from a decent Internet connection who doesn't want to break their anime viewing habits.

In an article lauding the feature over at Polygon, the publication reached out to rival service Crunchyroll, who had this to say:

“Our breadth of titles and relationships within the anime industry can’t be beat,” the rep said. “We know offline streaming is important to our viewers, and we're working to bring this feature to the platform in 2017 so that fans can keep up with their favorite shows wherever they are.”

Thus, it looks like the ability to cache and stream episodes of anime offline is high up the priority list for Crunchyroll's engineering team - we'll certainly be keeping our fingers crossed that they can indeed get this feature implemented soon across their various mobile apps so that we can start watching Seven Mortal Sins on the train.