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Streaming Anime is a Doomed Venture
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Sure, as long as all the speakers speak slowly, clearly and avoid any accents or dialects.
Translate accurately, I'm saying. And they have to do it in much less than a day, since they have to get a raw rip, translate the dialogue, typeset the subtitles, time the subtitles, edit them into the video, make a master, do a quality check on the master, etc.
If you have to have it cheap and fast, you'll probably put up with the translation being slightly off. If you're that concerned about the translation, you'll have to wait or pay. Or both.
The things I watch lately have actually been proven to never come out over here in the 30 years or so they've been around. Except for two times, and we don't talk about those.
I'd pay for anime if it was cheaper. I'd even consider paying more for toku if it existed.
I'm not saying getting an official sub out for streaming within a day of first airing is going to save the industry (still seems like the US side needs some way to actually make some money off it) but since they'd presumably some kind of actual translation staff and official access to the media and script it would be pretty feasible.
Free fan-subs make this market really hard to salvage. There's a couple really good groups out there that provide quick and good translations, typically BETTER than the official translations, the same night it airs in Japan. Most good fan-subs do not censor their works, the official ones however, censor more often than not.
I am very anti-piracy for the most part. I feel people should get paid for the work that they do. That said, I'm not going to pay someone to give me censored content when I can get a better product, uncensored and for free. Period. If you want me to pay, then give me a better product than what I can get for free, otherwise tough luck, you're not working hard enough for my money.
As for the written vs spoken thing, don't they have closed captioning in Japan? I'm sure some fansubbers use that to help them translate faster.
Uh...the majority of anime brought over here these days is uncut.
In fact more and more series are purposefully censored on television, to entice people into buying the DVDs. And yes, when companies in the US license the show they get the uncensored DVD version.
In fact more and more series are purposefully censored on television, to entice people into buying the DVDs. And yes, when companies in the US license the show they get the uncensored DVD version.[/QUOTE]
This reminds me of those ridiculous shower scenes where they airbrush the entire scene white and call it 'steam'.
This reminds me of those ridiculous shower scenes where they airbrush the entire scene white and call it 'steam'.[/QUOTE]
See, they do that nowadays, but now people know if they buy it on DVD the steam won't be so omnipresent.
Obviously only certain kinds of shows do this sort of blatant enticement, but guess what, it's those shows that seem to sell more nowadays.
Like I had caught a few episodes of Kiddy Girl And- at a convention, and the whole first episode is about underwear and the main girl running around without any. And the second has multiple long bath scenes. There's cleavage everywhere. They'd screened that one and said it was nowhere near what they were looking for.
Uh? Your memory is almost completely wrong. Especially considering its prequel, which was panty shots every 30 seconds. KG-A's bigger issue is that it was a godawful piece of crap.
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Just as a pedantic point, a lot of censoring is done by broadcasters, not by the studios. There certainly are plenty of things studios do, but if it looks like someone just dumped a lazy video filter over part of the screen, it's typically the work of the broadcaster. Sometimes if you catch multiple airings, you can even see how different stations censor things differently. I tried to dig it up, but for the original Sekirei series, there were four different versions of the same scene. One had a convenient beam obscuring things, one had mist, one had massive glare, etc. It was quite amusing.
A great example of this is One Piece. When they started the official stream last year there were still some decently qualified and fast groups doing the fansubs "because fans demanded HD quality pirated rips" instead of actually supporting the release (Also for non US english speakers, I suppose) and the quality difference between the two was night and day.
Another good example I can remember was Naruto. The uncut DVD subtitles are about a million times better then the thrown together Dattebayo subs were.
Those companies also go out of their way to specifically target Western markets: Metroid Prime, MGS, Red Steel, Killzone, Dead Rising, etc. You can throw Squeenix (Supreme Commander 2, Kane & Lynch 2) in there as well. Is there anime out there that was made to specifically target at Western mass audiences?
Look at Jackie Chan. He didn't blow up in the West by constantly bringing out Chinese-targeted movies, he started targeting Western mass audiences by pairing up with Chris Tucker, Owen Wilson, Will Smith's kid, etc. The kung fu movies that still target Chinese audiences still mostly stay in China.
I believe his point wasn't that speed subs are better, but that the community at large, given a choice between a quality sub in a couple days or a shitty one now will take the shitty one. The reason for this being, well, exactly what happens in the 1 piece thread every time a new episode hits. They would rather watch shitty subs and participate in whatever discussion is around than wait a few days and be behind the times.
(Yes I know the official 1 piece stream isn't shitty. But we don't have a current anime thread I could pull an example from. How about The original runs of Code Geass and Gurren Lagann).
LoL: failboattootoot
Official translations have a pretty checkered past, and while things are gotten better I think that to a large extent they have not fully regained consumer confidence. With a fansub, even if parts are not so great, it's at least pretty obvious and you can take it with a grain of salt. But with an official sub, it can be really hard to tell what they fucked up and what not.
What am I wrong about? Maybe I'm exaggerating too much to emphasize the point I was making? I actually liked the show, and I own a few discs of Kiddy Grade but I haven't watched it yet.
Can anyone give me an example of how the uncuct dvd subs were better?
Naruto was about when I checked out of anime and yeah I was watching the dattebayo subs. It doesn't seem like I missed anything but how could I know?
I disagree, I think Dattebayo's subs are a million times better than Crunchy Roll's, for instance. Comparing apples to apples, Dattebayo added their own flavour to the translation and added in the karaoke at the start and end. Whereas Crunchy Roll seems censored and stiff to me. I tried Crunchy Roll out for their free trial but nixed it because it wasn't on the same level as what Dattebayo used to put out.
Typically, even it there are some errors, I'm willing to put up with it. It's not hard to read between the lines and figure out what they're saying for yourself. I don't want to wait forever for the official translation just so I can read a "perfectly" translated/localized script. The danger in waiting being accidentally reading/seeing a spoiler somewhere on the net from someone who didn't wait.
Naruto (and Bleach/One Piece/Any prime time Jump show) is a poor example for any kind of DVD changes because they veer closer to the western economic model. Their DVD sales are crap, but since people actually watch them, they get advertising bucks (and more importanty, keep the franchise going).
Re:Reynolds
A.) Most people who actually watched it would remember that the entire second half of the second episode is one long string of naked gay men. Not the 45 seconds of a single bath scene.
B.) Yeah, the show was like "I'm not wearing any underwear!" but there were zero risque shots. Compared to Kiddy Grade where some episodes literally do not go a minute without some kind of awful bouncing or upskirt shot, that excuse doesn't fly at all.
most people in the west aren't willing to listen to japanese voice acting and read subs when watching a show.
if they want to attract the casual viewers, who are the biggest market in sheer numbers, they need to provide quality dubs.
america got a big voice acting industry. they should employ that more.
Then again I don't think that's just for anime with me.
Lots of female characters in dubbed anime just sound so unnatural.
To be fair, a lot of it sounds unnatural even in Japanese.
The US produces more media than anybody else in the world by a massive margin. We're basically saturated in television shows. Hence, there's lots to export (and lots of demand for it). Importing stuff though, especially a media that is almost nothing but short term shows that you can't build long contracts with/over though? That's rougher.
Americans market the hell out of it and don't charge an arm and a leg for a DVD overseas.
Also most things are released at reasonably similar time as it's released in the states. Long delayed historically lead to loss of interest and everyone still interested already saw it with the help of ************
It's an issue of what the market will bear. The total market is small as not that many people watch anime in the US. It's also made up by a group of people who by and large have no problem pirating the content, and the original market for these DVD sales has even worse pricing practices so they have no problem making the foreign distribution costs high.
3000 yen = $40 USD
It's $18 on amazon.com. Is this a good parallel?
Anecdotal, but I've witnessed people dropping long running series, because the manga couldn't keep up, so the anime has to resort to pointless filler after another. Another issue is that because localization takes a considerable amount of time, sometimes long after the manga run, people just buy the manga instead, which usually tells the same story.
The film/tv industry and the comic industry are two seperate markets, whereas the anime and manga industry has to compete for the same demographic.
This is partly why animation companies have tried to create original shows, but a lot of them fail because of various reasons, not least the lack of exposure and existing fanbase manga adaptions enjoy.
A trend I seem to notice is that companies now try to deviate towards adapting light and visual novels. I don't see them becoming popular and therefore profitable in the West, though there are exceptions.
Interest in non-manga-derived shows in the west has largely come through a large number of people grabbing a new series and giving it a go and then spreading the interest through word of mouth. It was usually after that initial window of interest that distributors could hope to make some money of a property with that built-in audience.
The main problem with streaming is that you're effectively bypassing that audience gestation period. It's not going to effect, say, Bleach, One Piece or Naruto being commercially viable in the States or Australia, but it's certainly working against the takeup of some potentially amazing new series coming out of Japan.
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Didn't half of them come out of fan-sub groups anyway? ADV did, right?
The hardcore who want subbed translations have little in common with the people who want dubbed localisations. And neither really wants DvDs as the primary source, so even if you manage to produce both and out them on a DVD (which is frankly pretty close to creating two entirely different products) without simultaneous streaming and a TV release, respectively, to produce interest you probably won't sell well enough to make it worthwhile.
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-10-20/funimation-recalls-1st-birdy-the-mighty-decode-dvd-set
Fuckups like this.
They released a DVD set with the wrong things on it, and are waiting until the release of the next DVD to ship out replacement copies to retailers. Maybe if the industry could go 6 months without some kind of colossal fuckup, it'd have a chance.
Bandai was pretty well known for that. I forget how long their turnaround time was though for replacing the discs though.
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