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Editorial: An Open Letter to the Industry

I'm sorry, but unless I have proof (even a rough number would be okay) of figures, it's an uncitable argument.

Anyway, look Zac, I pay for a movie. I don't pay for 15 minutes of a conglomerate of Ads and Movie Trailers where i'm not gonna like most of them. To me, I feel like i'm being cheated out of part of my ticket price, the snacks I buy, and my time.

As I said, I take it on good faith that one of the people running this site with much more inside information and a better general outlook on anime as a whole would not lie (and in a recent article where the company that dubbed Haruhi mentioned "if it would've sold 1/3 as well compared to being downloaded")

It's worse than that. In many ways, being able to block the illegal distribution of copyrighted material is the same (on a technical level) as being able to block, say, video evidence of a totalitarian government plotting to round up and torture dissidents. The necessary technical and legal restrictions to ensure that fansubbers can always be traced could also be (for example) used by the Burmese government to find and punish people leaking video of them beating protestors to the world news.

Sure, there's a vast, gaping ethical gap between the two, but the technology doesn't care about ethics. This is why some of the more extreme ideas suggested to block piracy make civil libertarians very, very nervous. Of course, this hasn't stopped certain of the big media corporations trying to go through with ideas that would be more damaging than the piracy they're intended to stop.

-Z- wrote:

Let's make a few assumptions. Average series length is 24, average 4 episodes per US dvd @ $25 per dvd. So $150 for an entire series. What rational human being would want to spend $150 on watching on buying an anime series when they can watch, as well as download, it all at similar quality level for free.

Or for a much cheaper price. Don't forget to add thin-paks into that equation.
They haven't been mentioned here (that i remember...what w/35+pgs) but there have been many a time someone has said: i'll just wait for the thin-pak.

What with it costing 3x less than that in some cases. Or even the full disc boxsets are cheaper than that around $60-70.

Man, you didn't understand the comic. Tsk tsk tsk.

britannicamoore wrote:

-Z- wrote: Let's make a few assumptions. Average series length is 24, average 4 episodes per US dvd @ $25 per dvd. So $150 for an entire series. What rational human being would want to spend $150 on watching on buying an anime series when they can watch, as well as download, it all at similar quality level for free. Or for a much cheaper price. Don't forget to add thin-paks into that equation. They haven't been mentioned here (that i remember...what w/35+pgs) but there have been many a time someone has said: i'll just wait for the thin-pak. What with it costing 3x less than that in some cases. Or even the full disc boxsets are cheaper than that around $60-70.

Thinpaks and boxsets are a moot point. The only time they're any good is when it's a series that had not been fansubbed yet.

Otherwise the time it takes to hit the market is too great. Fansubs will have been on the net for far too long a time period for it to do any good.

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I'm sure anybody in the entertainment industry looking at this thread would see a number of people say that they just want to sample the show, and then question how many would then come up with new excuses not to buy it. They fear that if they streamed shows with commercials, fans would still go to the fansubs to get copies of the show without commercials. That if you say you'll pay online for episodes, you still won't. This kind of things happens a lot online

If there is no attempt whatever on the part of the industry to develop a real presence online for their consumers it does not count as avoiding a failed business venture, only as avoiding a business opportunity. If you never build it, your customers will -never- come.

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Beyond that, some sugestions arent' feasible, getting anime on TV in a rapid pace for example would require changing, dropping, or ignoring any number of national and international copyright, distribution, and broadcast laws.

So due to the development of an entirely new technology that has largely rendered our old concepts of information distribution on a global scale meaningless we may have to reform the way our governments approach things? Seems that with an entire industry on the verge of collapse now would be the best possible time to make the case for some newer and more logical trade agreements to cover this area.

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There's no point for a business to follow the demand of those that either don't pay money for a product or pay very little, they want to meet the demand of those spending the green.

There are plenty of people throughout this topic history, myself included, who have stated very clearly we are either already spending money on anime or would love to spend more on anime, but the products we are trying to purchase are simply not available. American movie studios realized years ago that making the consumer wait for a Hollywood movie to come out on DVD had a simple formula of time versus sales where the longer the DVD release took the lower sales could be expected to be. When you are in the business of marketing and distributing something that is based largely on pop culture it is a fatal business flaw to move slowly in getting your product to the consumer while it is still hot, and anime suffers from one of the longest time delays of any modern pop culture product.

Haruhi DVD 1 sold 60,000 units in America (retail 4 episode DVD/$20), by Bandai's own accounting. In comparison, it sold 80,000 units in Japan (retail 2 episode DVD/$40).

I'm sorry, but unless I have proof (even a rough number would be okay) of figures, it's an uncitable argument.

re: ads

People said they'd buy Haruhi when it came out on DVD, but apparantly they didn't [in numbers as large as those that said they'd buy it], so the company did it's best to meet fan demand, and got a list of new excuses for it.

As for Haruhi, Vidscan reports about 6500 units of volume 1 sold in the first month, split very nicely 50/50 between the LE and the regular edition. By the end of September this was up to 12,000 units, but with the split more 60/40.

Volume 2 did about 6000 units in the first month (60/40 split) and 8400 units by the end of September.

On average, 1st month sales are about 80% of the lifetime total, so we can see that Haruhi is staying very green, selling units well into the 2nd and 3rd month.

Vidscan typically accounts for 50-66% of total sales (since many sources don't report to Vidscan), for a title like Haruhi, I'd expect that % to be closer to 50% because it would sell very strongly at specialty shops and online, which tend not to report.

Given that the report I'm looking at is 45 days old, I'd say there might have been another 2000 units of V1 sold, which would bring the vidscan total to 14,000. Let's make it 15,000 to be liberal.

We'll double that to account for non-reporting and we get 30,000 units total.

So, with an *extremely* liberal estimate, Haruhi volume 1 may have sold 30,000 units. Personally I highly doubt it's sold that many, no way has it sold 60,000.

We've heard first hand that Haruhi's sales were "disappointing," and that it sold below expectations. While I've provided a rough, high-ball estimate of what Haruhi may have sold, we have no idea what Bandai actually expected to sell.

But if they sold 60,000 units, I guarantee they wouldn't be disappointed. Perhaps they shipped 60k units? Perhaps they sold 60k units total over all 4 volumes?

-Z- wrote:

britannicamoore wrote: -Z- wrote: Let's make a few assumptions. Average series length is 24, average 4 episodes per US dvd @ $25 per dvd. So $150 for an entire series. What rational human being would want to spend $150 on watching on buying an anime series when they can watch, as well as download, it all at similar quality level for free. Or for a much cheaper price. Don't forget to add thin-paks into that equation. They haven't been mentioned here (that i remember...what w/35+pgs) but there have been many a time someone has said: i'll just wait for the thin-pak. What with it costing 3x less than that in some cases. Or even the full disc boxsets are cheaper than that around $60-70. Thinpaks and boxsets are a moot point. The only time they're any good is when it's a series that had not been fansubbed yet. Otherwise the time it takes to hit the market is too great. Fansubs will have been on the net for far too long a time period for it to do any good.

Not to mention not all series ever get a complete collection let alone a thin pack. So it's not even guaranteed that a series will get one. And even if they do it's as has been mentioned usually too late because if the person wasn't going to pay before and got the fansubs I doubt they'll suddenly go out and even buy the thin pack later after they've seen the series.

Based on what Bandai and other parties have said, I'm going to assume "disappointed" means they overproduced the title and didn't get the sell-through they were expecting. That's generally what happens when you see the sales numbers and they seem OK but the distributor is saying otherwise.

*bunch of happy little numbers

If it weren't for advertisers, we wouldn't be having this conversation because this website wouldn't exist as it is today.

-t

Based on what Bandai and other parties have said, I'm going to assume "disappointed" means they overproduced the title and didn't get the sell-through they were expecting. That's generally what happens when you see the sales numbers and they seem OK but the distributor is saying otherwise.

I started thinking of what was one of the first things mentioned in the article--what I'm calling "US Anime Industry Prehistory", that time which older fans seem to recall with pride when it was next to impossible to obtain anime and only obtainable through VHS of questionable quality. For some reason the "demise" of the industry has been repeatedly linked to the new generation's sense of "entitlement". I fail though to see how older fans were any less "entitled" than new fans are. We had a situation where there was a demand for Japanese anime but no US businesses to meet that supply. So people subbed - illegally (and unethically depending on your viewpoint).

Yet, somehow people seem to be seeing demands for fast releases as a symptom of something bad compared to the good old days when people "waited their turn". But taking the Apple analogy, isn't this just an issue of efficiency--of one thief being mad that another thief was able to not only steal faster than him but to also grab a lot of iphones and distribute them to his friends? Well, if you're the slow thief it makes sense to welcome the industry doesn't it? Because no matter what they charge you, the opportunity cost for you as a slow thief is still higher. To the slow thief, the industry will always look like it's at a high point in its development simply because it can produce what he wants faster and cheaper than he can do it himself.

What I'm trying to get at is there seems to be an assumption buried in the main article and on the parts of the "old" fans
that there was a time when fansubs were not just a symptom of a complacent industry but that they served a noble purpose as an exposure tool or either represented such a small black market that they had no effect on the japanese industry. It's even been brought up a few times that while the fansubs might have started out as providing exposure, the American Industry has developed enough that fansubbing is doing more harm than good. My question is based on what?

But evidently you feel that you yourself do. Oh but I forgot, you're in buisness school.