On July 24, 2009, Viz Media announced that the series would be released on the iTunes Store. Later the following 2 weeks, Viz began providing subtitled versions of the latest Naruto: Shippuden episodes a week after they first aired in Japan, with a new episode being added to the Naruto website each subsequent Thursday. On January 2, 2009, Viz Media and Crunchyroll provided eight English subtitled Naruto: Shippuden episodes on the official Naruto website. It began broadcasting on February 15, 2007, on TV Tokyo, and concluded on March 23, 2017. The series is directed by Hayato Date, and produced by Pierrot and TV Tokyo. It is set two and a half years after the original series in the Naruto universe, following the teenage ninja Naruto Uzumaki and his allies. Naruto: Shippuden is an anime television series mainly adapted from Part II of Masashi Kishimoto's original Naruto manga series, with exactly 500 episodes. For the list of episodes from the original Naruto series, see List of Naruto episodes. This article is about the episodes in the Naruto: Shippuden series.
