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Streaming Anime is a Doomed Venture
Aroduc
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regular
This is not a thread for discussing random anime shows. Don't even try.
Background info first.
The western anime market has been steadily falling since being estimated at around $550 million in 2003 (Pokemon/Yugioh/DBZ boom) and ICv2 has it down to around $160-200 million last year. Even while the Japanese anime market was going berserk (~2002-2006 was a crazy bubble), the US market has been steadily falling apart.
Since the complaint from fans was that DVDs took too long to reach the west, there's been a huge push in the US market to move to a 'simulcast' streaming model for licensing. This has resulted in almost all shows in recent seasons being licensed for distribution as they are produced and then officially distributed with subtitles within a day to a week by services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, The Anime Network, etc. If you pay, you can get those subs a week earlier than free users and use their archives.
However, the increase in streaming has not stemmed the western decline at all. It's clear at this point that it is not the answer to save western distribution. It has found a measure of success simply by dint of stripping away costs like packaging, store distribution, English voice acting, etc, which I believe in the long run is going to end up shrinking the market by making it even more inaccessible to the general public. Furthermore, unlike western services like Hulu, the Japanese production companies are completely divorced from the online western distribution companies. This is compounded by the fact that these distributors are incompetent as fuck. Unaired episodes are leaked all the time, and in perhaps the biggest display of chutzpah in this whole debacle, even as Anime News Network is condemning people for "illegally distributing" an episode that they uploaded and put zero security on this afternoon, their own writers are posting proof positive that they're using illegally distributed fansubs.
I just thought ANN's rampant blatant hypocrisy was funny.
There's a further issue with the difference between the economic model between Japan and the west. Broadcast anime is done at a huge loss. Most of it airs at fuckall o'clock and studios have to purchase airtime. There is little to no profit to be made from advertising or the like. Almost everything comes from DVD sales, or in the case of primetime shows (Naruto, Bleach, PreCure, etc), merchandising. This results in the infamous overpriced DVDs that cost two or three times as much for half the number of episodes as western shows. Furthermore, licenses being held by multiple companies means that DVDs are becoming less common in the western market. Crunchyroll in particular owns dozens of licenses, and has only released a single DVD (5cm per Second). In effect, they have created a new revenue source by completely killing the old one.
Commercial break for text spewage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5lz2CYNR4
So in review.
The western anime market has been collapsing for a long time since it peaked in 2003. Attempts at streaming have failed to stop or even slow this. The streamers are incompetent as hell and blatently violating the very practice that they're trying to encourage in the US market.
Is it fixable at this point? How? How do you reconcile the two disparate economic models on the global scale?
Personally, I think the market is pretty well fucked at this point and it's only a matter of time before Japanese companies get fed up with the constant fuckups and lack of control and try to handle it themselves, thereby essentially eliminating western distributors altogether. I'm amazed that they haven't simply hired a couple professionals and taken personal control of at least translation and distribution given how frequent fuckups are. The super popular stuff that has plenty of merchandising dollars to be made will still make it over and be vomitted up on Adut Swim at 11pm on Saturdays, but streaming has obviously not been the answer to save the western market and instead, the main thing it seems to be accomplishing is killing the (admittedly already failed) DVD market. It doesn't help that the streamers have been mostly inept too, but western anime distributors being hypocritical jackoffs is nothing new. I figure that it's only a matter of time before one of the streamers fucks up badly enough to remove any and all faith that they're worth dealing with anymore.
As a side note, it's somewhat baffling to me that Japan hasn't embraced the internet age with respect to media at all. They still sell massively expensive singles on CD for example and seem allergic to decent web design. They're weird.
Whew.
Background info first.
The western anime market has been steadily falling since being estimated at around $550 million in 2003 (Pokemon/Yugioh/DBZ boom) and ICv2 has it down to around $160-200 million last year. Even while the Japanese anime market was going berserk (~2002-2006 was a crazy bubble), the US market has been steadily falling apart.
Since the complaint from fans was that DVDs took too long to reach the west, there's been a huge push in the US market to move to a 'simulcast' streaming model for licensing. This has resulted in almost all shows in recent seasons being licensed for distribution as they are produced and then officially distributed with subtitles within a day to a week by services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, The Anime Network, etc. If you pay, you can get those subs a week earlier than free users and use their archives.
However, the increase in streaming has not stemmed the western decline at all. It's clear at this point that it is not the answer to save western distribution. It has found a measure of success simply by dint of stripping away costs like packaging, store distribution, English voice acting, etc, which I believe in the long run is going to end up shrinking the market by making it even more inaccessible to the general public. Furthermore, unlike western services like Hulu, the Japanese production companies are completely divorced from the online western distribution companies. This is compounded by the fact that these distributors are incompetent as fuck. Unaired episodes are leaked all the time, and in perhaps the biggest display of chutzpah in this whole debacle, even as Anime News Network is condemning people for "illegally distributing" an episode that they uploaded and put zero security on this afternoon, their own writers are posting proof positive that they're using illegally distributed fansubs.
I just thought ANN's rampant blatant hypocrisy was funny.
There's a further issue with the difference between the economic model between Japan and the west. Broadcast anime is done at a huge loss. Most of it airs at fuckall o'clock and studios have to purchase airtime. There is little to no profit to be made from advertising or the like. Almost everything comes from DVD sales, or in the case of primetime shows (Naruto, Bleach, PreCure, etc), merchandising. This results in the infamous overpriced DVDs that cost two or three times as much for half the number of episodes as western shows. Furthermore, licenses being held by multiple companies means that DVDs are becoming less common in the western market. Crunchyroll in particular owns dozens of licenses, and has only released a single DVD (5cm per Second). In effect, they have created a new revenue source by completely killing the old one.
Commercial break for text spewage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5lz2CYNR4
So in review.
The western anime market has been collapsing for a long time since it peaked in 2003. Attempts at streaming have failed to stop or even slow this. The streamers are incompetent as hell and blatently violating the very practice that they're trying to encourage in the US market.
Is it fixable at this point? How? How do you reconcile the two disparate economic models on the global scale?
Personally, I think the market is pretty well fucked at this point and it's only a matter of time before Japanese companies get fed up with the constant fuckups and lack of control and try to handle it themselves, thereby essentially eliminating western distributors altogether. I'm amazed that they haven't simply hired a couple professionals and taken personal control of at least translation and distribution given how frequent fuckups are. The super popular stuff that has plenty of merchandising dollars to be made will still make it over and be vomitted up on Adut Swim at 11pm on Saturdays, but streaming has obviously not been the answer to save the western market and instead, the main thing it seems to be accomplishing is killing the (admittedly already failed) DVD market. It doesn't help that the streamers have been mostly inept too, but western anime distributors being hypocritical jackoffs is nothing new. I figure that it's only a matter of time before one of the streamers fucks up badly enough to remove any and all faith that they're worth dealing with anymore.
As a side note, it's somewhat baffling to me that Japan hasn't embraced the internet age with respect to media at all. They still sell massively expensive singles on CD for example and seem allergic to decent web design. They're weird.
Whew.
Aroduc on
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Yeah, that's been my working theory too since they're crazy about their cellphones, but they still put all sorts of effort into making disgustingly bloated Flash powered sites to advertise new shows and shit. They just then proceed to usually completely ignore them once the show has started airing.
There is some shift to media streaming on Nico lately but studios seem to still just be testing the waters. They did a few series totally on Nico a year or two back (Penguin Musume and Candy Boy I believe), but since that quickly stopped, I assume it was a failure. There are a couple shows that are being simulcast on Nico this season though, so they're trying something again. Nobody watches shit on Japanese TV though, so it's not really abundantly clear to me what the goal is.
Hell, when I bought my first DVD series back in the early 2000s, my local Best Buy anime section was somewhere between 1.5 and 2 full rows like you're talking about.
Now? Fuck-all. I don't even bother looking anymore.
Oops. Grabbed the wrong number in the original post. ICv2 puts the manga market at $140 million last year (what I had for anime), and the anime market at $160-200 this year.
Anyway, the manga market's also declining pretty steeply, but it peaked a little later than the anime market.
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-10-07/icv2/north-american-manga-market-to-drop-20-percent-in-2010
The manga market in Japan also dwarfs the anime market, so it's unlikely that's going anywhere any time soon.
Hulu is an American service, not a western. Not that I'm pissed At All!
And maybe this hole thing is just an indication that the US was never that much into Anime. I don't know the figures, but where I'm from we are used to subtitles, so a lack of a (typically) bad English dubbing shouldn't really be a problem.
For the record I like Anime, but I have to say that I was surprised when everybody started watching it. Maybe there was an "unnatural" interest that wont come back.
.
Island. Being on fire.
It was a fad, just like anything else.
Except for companies like Nintendo, Capcom, Sony, and Konami, yeah? Basically, if you make a good product, and do a good job on marketing it, it'll do fine for you. Anime, video games, whatever.
This isn't true. Do some research, there are a ton of Japanese companies that don't make the money they need to stay here. Just because you can name four companies (one of which makes a ton of other electronics) doesn't mean it's the same for all of them.
And those companies have the cash to market it. That's actually probably more important than making a good game, and I'm happy to cite bazillions of examples.
Another issue that has also been mentioned was that the bubble was just that, and this is merely a self-correction to reduce to the market to a more sustainable size. Anime was always destined to be a niche market in the long run.
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I agree. I got into Anime/Manga with movies like Akira, Ghost in a Shell and Patlabor 1/2. I read Manga like Appleseed and Sanctuary(with Crying Freeman thrown in). The first Manga I read was Gen: the boy from Hiroshima. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the western comics like Batman and Superman.
Bleach and Naruto do nothing for me in comparison. I got into it anime/manga because it dealt with adult issues and storylines and now the market has devolved into a kiddie section with the Shonen titles. Which is fun for teenagers, but leaves us non-otaku adults out of the market. High-school romance/Harem series and Magical Girl stories are not something I like reading.(Ouran Host Club was the exeption).
Its also hard for me as an adult to ignore that Japan has a pretty racist/sexist culture by western standards.
I'm not convinced by that argument. As long as there's been anime, there's been overly-commercial dreck. It's just that it tends to be the good, interesting stuff that is best-remembered a long time after it's been released, creating the illusion that older shows used to be better as a whole.
That, and the western anime market was more limited then, meaning that only the exceptional shows tended to be widely-recognised. Even then, we got plenty of dull shonen-bait - remember Dragonball Z and Urusei Yatsura?
I honestly think a large problem here is that Localization is a much bigger business than people think. Think of what would happen to revenue from transportation services if 90%+ in New York City started telecommuting. I think there has been a lot of resistance in the last 10 years to immediate subbing because of this.
But maybe I'm talking out of my ass, I don't know. My argument comes from cynicism rather than proof.
The prices of the DVDs are OMGWTF! When they are charging $4-6 per episode of a series that has 50 episodes, I mean damn. That being said. Occasionally, I will find series that I have downloaded on special or a collection pack where the price is $2-3 per episode, and I happily buy it and delete my downloaded version.
I would love to support anime more, but I really can't afford to be popping out $200-300 for a series. Maybe if we could buy them direct from the studio dubbed or subbed, the price would be less? I mean no middle man to mark up the prices. Do you think that would help the market?
Agreed, my thinking is the same.
I, for one, welcome the death of our Western Anime Overlords.
Maybe whatever rises from the rubble won't try to sell DVDs for $Texas and feign surprise when nobody bites.
Sometimes I just want a decent fucking story about some normal fucking people dealing with every fucking day shit.
Dragonball and Urusei Yatsura was more of a North American thing. I am European and we never got that here. At least I didn't hear about it.
Here it was much more focused, with distributors trying to carve a niche that wasn't taken by either American and European comics. I don't doubt that there has always been comercial shonen dreck, but there was limited export of it.
... You realize there's a genre devoted to that, right?
isn't part of that the manga/anime artists decided that if they are not willing to pay for their (perceived) quality then too bad?
the only anime I am familiar with is pokemon, dbz, and the shonen jump stuff on hulu. I remember a guy I used to live with watching naruto at like 6 AM.
Hello there, let me introduce you to my friend Lucky Star.
it seemed to be that I could go down to Hastings, (or insert regional rental place) pick a show or movie and find something good about the experience.
I have to actively hunt to find something of quality now, especially since most of it can have a decent story but has god-awful CG art.
Streaming isn't going to work because of reasons Aroduc already said (being divorced from the mainstream is particularly painful since it means the entire fandom shrinks into a clique which the design committees cater to--not that this isn't happening already in Japan), and a television presence--an anime's only real chance of becoming popular (aside from having a showing in theaters)--is pretty much gone now. Not to mention the quality of translation in these streaming sites can sometimes be very questionable. Their tendency to include an abundance of untranslated words and leave in honorifics that the fanbase are expected to know--to produce a quality of translation more befitting a fansub, in other words--is very unprofessional and only enhances the impenetrability of the medium.
I'm less inclined to comment on quality being a factor because opinionsandtastelol, but I can't ignore the fact that, at least on a personal level, most anime being released is drivel. Now granted, this is probably true for each medium, but in TV anime, the ratio of crap-to-good is sad. And content wise, there's very little out there that really speaks to me on an adult level, with adult level writing, plotting, and characterization. The Wire hit me real hard as a crime beat reporter, and seeing the same issues plaguing our city; I've yet to see the same level of writing of that show on an anime (I would love for someone to prove me wrong, though).
I normally just wait until the box sets come out for $50.
I know. I myself got into the medium with Yu Yu Hakusho and Voltes V, both of which are remembered quite fondly here in the Philippines. Still, I don't return to them or shows like them today. I mostly limit my anime watching to maybe one or two series each season that are passable to good, and then movies, which is where I find most of the good stuff. Kara no Kyoukai, in particular, is a recent favorite (obviously given my avatar and signature).
I'm citing the FMA DVDs I saw years ago.
This shit is expensive. Ridiculously so. Even at the price range you noted.
I am willing to drop $50 on a box set if I like the show.
Edit: Also, if the box set is limited edition and the show is awesome, I will drop up to $100.
Like I did for this:
That thing might just be one of the most fun and imaginative things in the movie format ever
But does it have a card game?
That said, I suspect people in the US don't so much want more Prince of Tennis as they want non-shonen action titles. Imagine, an anime war drama without cute mascots, chibis, or sweat drops!
Honestly even in the last few years there have been pretty big strides.
Like FMA:Brotherhood hasn't been selling in single DVDs, but rather in 13-episode bundles (and no doubt a box set will be on its way after awhile). For the most part the 13 episode bundle seems to be the new single DVD release. Probably helped a bit by streaming as it's basically free advertising, especially the ones that get to be on the major sites like Hulu (In fact I'd say for cases like these the streaming model has replaced the release of single expensive DVDs).
Though incidentally for the original FMA, after the single DVDs finished they released two boxsets and they're currently at $50 each, which doesn't sound too terrible a price for about 26 episodes of content in each.