Pokemon TV is shutting down, leaving the anime series scattered across eight streaming services

The Pokemon Company has announced its anime-viewing app Pokemon TV is shutting down in a couple of months time, which will make watching the series a bit tougher.

Announced yesterday on the official Pokemon website, Pokemon TV is shutting down March 28, later this year. If you already have the app downloaded, you'll be able to keep using it until then, but the app has already been delisted, meaning you can't download it from the iOS App Store, Google Play, or the Nintendo eShop anymore. Given that things like the anime will be more popular with children than adults, this will likely be more relevant to your kids than it is to you, so if they use the app a lot, you might want to let them down gently.

While the app never had the entire collection of anime available at one time, it did rotate seasons in and out, making it a relatively convenient way to enjoy the show, as well as some of the various shorts released over the year. Conveniently, The Pokemon Company has released a list of places you can watch the Pokemon anime. Inconveniently, in terms of streaming the anime, you'll have to be subscribed to seven streaming services, with most of the shorts like Pokemon: Paldean Winds and Evolutions available on YouTube.

I cannot begin to explain how baffling it is that the Pokemon anime is distributed across streaming services. It's easy enough to watch the first season, it's on Netflix. After that you'll need to move over to Prime Video for season two, though this is under Prime Video Channels, which typically charge an extra fee. Through that, and some seasons that are just outright available on the service, you could technically watch up to season 22 on Prime, then switch back to Netflix for season 23 through 25. Otherwise, you'll have to bounce between Hulu, the Roku Channel, Tubi, Freevee, and… Hoopla? Yeah, I'll pass thanks.