4 Major Brands And Apps You Might Not Realize Are Owned By Sony

Sony is a massive corporation, and easily one of the most recognizable in the world. While it started as a small company in the mid-1940s, over the years, Sony has become almost synonymous with the entertainment industry thanks to the company's various brands such as PlayStation, Sony Music Entertainment, and the variety of media studios that it has brought under its far-reaching umbrella. On top of being active in the content creation side of the industry, Sony has gone on to offer an assortment of entertainment-related items, including televisions and even the Sony Walkman, which revolutionized how we listen to music on-the-go.

But like many big conglomerates, Sony has its hands in a lot of places, and that means that there are inevitably going to be some brands and apps you might not realize fall under the company's extensive list of ownings. Here, we're going to bypass some of the more notable acquisitions — like Sony's purchase of Bungie, the original developers of "Halo" — and take a look at some brands and apps that slipped in under the radar.

One of the first brands you might not realize belongs to Sony is Audeze, a popular audio technology company known for its high-end gaming headphones. The company originally began out of a garage back in 2008, with a goal to bring NASA technology to high-end audio products. Since then, the company has grown and expanded its offerings, all while focusing on providing U.S.-built headphones to its customers.

The company was purchased by Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC in 2023, with it set to continue operating independently of Sony despite being under its umbrella. Audeze has continued to offer high-end music products in the form of premium gaming and professional-grade headsets. The brand is rated highly among audiophiles who still miss some of its discontinued headphones like the Audeze Sine.

While Audeze doesn't hide its connection to Sony as a whole, it continues to operate as its own entity, so it's easy to miss the connection, even if you own a pair of these headphones yourself. Following the acquisition in 2023, Sony released a pair of its own branded headphones using Audeze's magnetic planar driver technology, the PlayStation Pulse Elite.

This next brand is probably one you're not going to recognize right off the bat, especially since it has mostly been in the background since Sony purchased the service back in 2012. However, Gaikai was one of the original big contenders for cloud gaming back in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Gaikai tried its best to convince gamers that playing video games over the internet without owning them physically was the future.

Gaikai served as the developer for the tech behind PlayStation's Remote Play functionality, which allowed users to stream their games from the PlayStation 4 to the PlayStation Vita. When it was acquired by Sony in 2012, a lot of people had high hopes for what Sony and PlayStation might be able to accomplish with Gaikai onboard, especially since it had proven to be a fairly successful cloud-based gaming service on its own. However, several years later, many argue that the potential was wasted and that Sony squandered the opportunity that owning Gaikai gave it in the early 2010s by not utilizing the technology enough. That said, Gaikai continues to be a company that Sony relies on even now, over 10 years later, as Sony now offers cloud gaming on its PlayStation Portal remote console. Sony also purchased OnLive in 2015, scooping up the biggest competitor that Gaikai had when it was a standalone company.

If you've spent any amount of time in video games within the last several years, then you may have noticed the Wwise logo appearing on the splash screens that pop up as you load into the game. Wwise is an audio mixing technology that is developed by a company called Audiokinetic. The name stands for Wave Works Interactive Sound Engine, and it appears in thousands of games that ship each year. As for the company that owns Audiokinetic, it is none other than Sony itself.

That's right. Even if a game you're playing isn't a PlayStation title, it might have some part of Sony's technology in it if it utilizes Wwise. The technology is essentially an audio mixing system that allows for more dynamic soundscapes. Some recent titles that have utilized the system include Pearl Abyss's latest title, "Crimson Desert", Bungie's extraction shooter, "Marathon", and Capcom's survival horror game, "Resident Evil Requiem."

Streaming services are a dime a dozen these days, with some of the best streaming options like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ often headlining some of the biggest shows on television. But for at least 15 million subscribed anime fans around the world, Crunchyroll remains one of the best options for catching up on some of your favorite anime shows. What you might not know about Crunchyroll, though, is that it's actually owned by Sony, and has been since 2021, when Funimation Global Group (another company that Sony had purchased) completed its acquisition of the service from AT&T's WarnerMedia for $1.175 billion.

Crunchyroll was originally founded in 2006, as a hub for anime fans to share and watch clips. In 2008, it moved from allowing the sharing of unauthorized content and began picking up licenses to distribute some of the top anime around the world. Now, Crunchyroll offers over 1,000 titles across its streaming service and has become a household name for anime fans. While the service offered a free tier until recently, Crunchyroll has now ended its free plan and moved to paid subscriptions only.

While technically under the Sony umbrella, the company says it still works independently as a joint venture between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Aniplex to unite creators and fans all around the world.