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ANNCast - Stream It Again, Sam

And as of yesterday the board of YTV gave final approval to the project!

Currently we have 4 animation companies on board (but not yet officially signed the contract) and a fifth where we're doing the final push with this week (now that YTV made it official).

Feel free to speculate wildly about which ones they are! Hint: They're not dinky.

And then I find something else oddly relevant.
http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/26466/Anime+Production+Fund.html

Anyways, though it sounds great, the Mazer.jp thing seems almost too ambitious at this point. And even though from the interview he mentioned eventually doing the same thing, Sam's initiative of getting known, but older titles translated and licensed seems more focused currently with achievable goals to me, not to mention all the hard work of getting existing companies on board already done,

It's almost as if the Danny Choo project is focused on marketing the idea of Danny Choo, and Sam's project is focused on setting up a structure where its possible to offer legit access to anime that would otherwise be unlikely to be available except as bootlegs.

Asterisk-CGY wrote:

And then I find something else oddly relevant. http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/26466/Anime+Production+Fund.html

Talk about a coincidence. (... Interestingly since we're on the topic of the industry, in a link to another post, presumably from working with Good Smile, he mentions how rights holders get 2% to 5% of the retail (not list I guess) merch royalties. He also mentions how Japanese consumers are ordering anime from US amazon)

Anyways, though it sounds great, the Mazer.jp thing seems almost too ambitious at this point. And even though from the interview he mentioned eventually doing the same thing, Sam's initiative of getting known, but older titles translated and licensed seems more focused currently with achievable goals to me, not to mention all the hard work of getting existing companies on board already done,

I also wonder if closer integration of fans and producers would affect attitudes toward piracy. If fans had a stake, even if it was just an emotional one, in the distribution or even production of a series, besides probably being unlikely to pirate it themselves, they might more actively try to counteract piracy. That wouldn't necessarily even be more public hostility toward it or cooperation with authorities, but might produce more novel solutions that lower the incentives to pirate.

I'm not anywhere near qualified to think about this in detail, but it's an exciting pipe dream.

I also wonder if closer integration of fans and producers would affect attitudes toward piracy. If fans had a stake, even if it was just an emotional one, in the distribution or even production of a series, besides probably being unlikely to pirate it themselves, they might more actively try to counteract piracy. That wouldn't necessarily even be more public hostility toward it or cooperation with authorities, but might produce more novel solutions that lower the incentives to pirate.

Yes, that's basically right. Song rights and lyrics have to get approved from the music production company, like avec or lantis or sony...

This is extra work for the Japanese company that is doing the international rights, and often times it's actually impossible to get lyrics approved in time.
**
However, about 1-2 months after the CDs are released it's okay, which is why DVD releases are not nearly as much of a problem.

504NOSON2 wrote:

I had absolutely no clue that most pirate groups don't even translate their own scripts; more reason to view most modern day digisubs as inferior to the official product.

It's been going on for a some time now (and that discounts the groups who rip official subs off discs and use those, something that's been going on for much longer). Some groups don't even disguise the fact. Some do, but a little digging will quickly expose which subs are "borrowed" and which aren't.

But don't worry Sam, I promise to take utmost care not to add any mistakes into your (older, fansub-era) scripts that I may or may not work with in the future.

I've been speculating about anime, and perhaps other media, at least partly adopting a subscription or contribution based model wherein masses of funds partly or wholly fund productions. I don't really know the knowledge to seriously evaluate the prospect and I think getting enough money would be hard, but I think that it's a promising concept. There are also a lot of things that would need to be resolved or sorted out even if we had the money. There would doubtless be many legal questions that could make it a mess. I also see a lot of potential problems in governance. Would fans who fund a project have any influence over the production, such as delegates on the production committee? Would they be treated as people who had just placed really, really advance preorders or more like shareholders entitled to some portion of the revenue?

Surrender Artist wrote:

I've been speculating about anime, and perhaps other media, at least partly adopting a subscription or contribution based model wherein masses of funds partly or wholly fund productions. I don't really know the knowledge to seriously evaluate the prospect and I think getting enough money would be hard, but I think that it's a promising concept. There are also a lot of things that would need to be resolved or sorted out even if we had the money. There would doubtless be many legal questions that could make it a mess. I also see a lot of potential problems in governance. Would fans who fund a project have any influence over the production, such as delegates on the production committee? Would they be treated as people who had just placed really, really advance preorders or more like shareholders entitled to some portion of the revenue?

Under current US law, only rich people can be shareholders like that("corruption"? What's that?), so treating them as early preorders would be the simplest route(it might be legal to treat larger contributers as bondholders, though).

I was really interested until the region lock reared it's satanic head.

Personally I don't feel its unfair. The point of investment is that risk leads to return. But mico-investors don't really "risk" anything ($50-$200 isn't what I call "risk"). So if the property they help fund takes off and becomes a huge success, it's not really them who should share in the profits, but those people like the creator and major investors that risk large amounts of money. The mico-investors get what they pay for, which is some kind of goods or service and the creation of the work itself.

Veers wrote:

It's been going on for a some time now (and that discounts the groups who rip official subs off discs and use those, something that's been going on for much longer). Some groups don't even disguise the fact. Some do, but a little digging will quickly expose which subs are "borrowed" and which aren't.

Not all subtitle "borrowing" is bad or lazy. Some groups that rip streaming subs do make very real improvements in terms of editing, timing, and typesetting, without introducing mistakes. Some even add clever localizations of their own, like "Magiclad Girl" in Is this a Zombie? instead of CR's untranslated "Masou Shoujo" or Funi's clunkier "Magical Garment Girl."

... Basically the only way to make it work is to have the micro-patrons "return" on investment be goods or services and no tied to the overall success of the franchise.

It might seem unfair, but it's the only way such a scheme works.