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Sometime in the last couple of days, a note was attached to the Omamori Himari page on Crunchyroll which stated that the series will be removed from the streaming site 30 days after the final episode airs on March 24th. The note also states that the video is being removed by Kadokawa. Another series licensed from Kadokawa, Sora no Otoshimono, was also quietly removed from the site sometime in the recent past. That one may have escaped notice from fans because it was a terrible series.

In an email, Crunchyroll VP of Licensing Rob Pereyda explained the removal of the series:

“While I cannot reveal too many details as to the specifics of the Kadokawa Pictures deals, I can confirm that there is a window in place for the two titles. While I am not privy to their entire media strategy, I can say that the windowing of content across various forms of media has become more and more widespread recently, especially overseas, and that both rights holders and distributors ultimately come to these kinds of agreements to best ensure the future, viable production of high-quality media.”

Translated, Kadokawa is only letting their series be licensed out for short periods of time. The most obvious reason why this could be a decent strategy is in hopes of getting a future DVD deal that fans will buy after having already been exposed to it while it aired. Then again, anime fans can have quite the short term memory at times. Sora no Otoshimono will always be remembered as the ‘flying pantsu’ series but Omamori Himari is never going to be known as the ‘warrior catgirl’ series so it’s hard to predict how these series would do on DVD.

It DOESN’T mean that either series has been licensed already but it could indicate that Kadokawa believes there is some kind of market for these series in the future. Because it’s not like we haven’t had our fill of supernatural or sci-fi harem series already.

In an slightly related note, the super natural action series Chrono Crusade was also recently removed from Crunchyroll. In this case however, Pereyda confirmed that they just decided not to renew the license for the series from Gonzo/GDH.

<Thanks to ScottFrye for the tip>

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