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In Japan, piracy is rampant for two main reasons:
1) it's cheaper to use the PC and internet connection you have, than a DVR you need to buy (due to the majority of Anime airing in the early hours of the morning)
2) TV in Japan is still highly regionalised: there are plenty of cases where if you live in one area, you will get some channels but not others, and vice versa.

That, and much more money is made from merchandise sales than DVD sales, and almost no money is made from TV airings (with most being a loss!) no matter how they're watched.

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Seriously, so you can't watch it on your Ipad? Big whoop.

Or, until recently, on 64 bit Linux. Or a set-top box. Or anything else that doesn't run whatever flavour of flash is required for streaming. Or anything without an internet connection.

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It's not anime companies jobs to be your personal servants and fulfill your every desire. It's a privilege, not a right. Grow up.

I'll ignore the words being put in my mouth, but consider this: There is a demand for high quality,non-streamed, non-DRM downloadable episodes. There is no legal supply.
"Anime companies jobs" are to make money. There is an unsupplied market here. There is no technical reason to leave this market unsupplied (if supply can be, and is, possible for free...), but there are decades of licensing cruft that need to be shifted. This cruft will either be shifted by companies taking a radical approach, or by companies failing and their replacements taking this new approach. Simply ignoring the market (or worse, actively trying to disrupt it) will not generate any profit.

Paploo wrote:

If you're outside North America, and want more anime accessible to you, support what's in your region, work for it, import, …

One must note that in one of such regions, importation is actually a problem for the local distributors. Those who support the quicker (and often cheaper) R1 products end up contributing to the American industry instead of their own — a damaging trend which local licensors often struggle to combat. I admit to being one of such persons, though very few of the titles I have imported have been released domestically thus far.

edzieba wrote:

Or, until recently, on 64 bit Linux.

Although flash sucks entirely on linux in general it was certainly useable in a 64 bit environment because every distro I'm aware of still ships 32 bit libraries for use by things like this.

edzieba wrote:

Quote:

It's not anime companies jobs to be your personal servants and fulfill your every desire. It's a privilege, not a right. Grow up.

I'll ignore the words being put in my mouth, but consider this: There is a demand for high quality,non-streamed, non-DRM downloadable episodes. There is no legal supply.
"Anime companies jobs" are to make money. There is an unsupplied market here. There is no technical reason to leave this market unsupplied (if supply can be, and is, possible for free...), but there are decades of licensing cruft that need to be shifted. This cruft will either be shifted by companies taking a radical approach, or by companies failing and their replacements taking this new approach. Simply ignoring the market (or worse, actively trying to disrupt it) will not generate any profit.

What he said.

Xanas wrote:

edzieba wrote:

Or, until recently, on 64 bit Linux.

Although flash sucks entirely on linux in general it was certainly useable in a 64 bit environment because every distro I'm aware of still ships 32 bit libraries for use by things like this.

I thought there were some issues with RTMP while using 32 bit flash with a 64 bit distro?

What he said was-

"high quality,non-streamed, non-DRM downloadable episodes. There is no legal supply.
"Anime companies jobs" are to make money. There is an unsupplied market here. There is no technical reason to leave this market unsupplied (if supply can be, and is, possible for free...)"

So basically, you both think the best business plan is to give away blu-ray quality episodes for free with no restrictions, downloadable and workable on any device. What reason would people have to buy dvd's? What reason would they have to watch advertisement supported streams if they had commercial free, DRM-free downloads? [I'm assuming you'd whinge if there was an unskipable Coke commerical every 8 minutes]

How would anime companies make money? This sounds like Underpants Gnomes economics to me.

It's a market anime companies don't want [giving away superior quality episodes with no profit whatsoever], and that is already out there already and difficult to compete with, much to their chagrin

Apparently all to service some computer nerds who don't use either of the dominant operating systems [Mac or Windows], or the most widespread internet animation program [Flash]. This sounds like crocodile tears to me.

And don't bring up the Merchandise Pony- not all anime/manga are suited to mass merchandising, nor does the way productions are made make it easy to profit off merchandise considering a toy company will be part of the production coalition, and make toys after tossing some money to help get the show made. From my understanding, most of the toy profits go back into making back that initial investment, while the anime company itself has to make its part of the investment back on dvd's, overseas merchandise, and future deals. I think Justin might of covered some of this in the ranttastic animenewsnetwork.com/anncast/2010-08-20 [correct me if I'm wrong, Justin. But an overall awesome podcast nonetheless]

Whatever our rhapsodizing on anime economics, the fact of the matter is that this woman did something illegal, immoral, that had a negative affect on anime producers, and was done without the creators permissions, violating their rights. You can skirt around it all you want, but that is the core issue- what was done was wrong, she's getting punished for it, and fans have to acknowledge the sinister aspects of how some participae in fandom, and the negative affects it has.

edzieba wrote:

Xanas wrote:

edzieba wrote:

Or, until recently, on 64 bit Linux.

Although flash sucks entirely on linux in general it was certainly useable in a 64 bit environment because every distro I'm aware of still ships 32 bit libraries for use by things like this.

I thought there were some issues with RTMP while using 32 bit flash with a 64 bit distro?

Ehh, you got me, I haven't tried the subscription stream here yet to confirm. I know Crunchyroll's regular stuff works fine, and Funi's stuff works fine, but it's possible something they have here won't work and yeah that would definitely be a big point against it since I use 64 bit Linux as my primary OS.

I haven't seen this 64 bit flash plugin on Linux yet, but I haven't looked too hard for it.

Flash is enormously buggy on both operating systems.

Zin5ki wrote:

One must note that in one of such regions, importation is actually a problem for the local distributors. Those who support the quicker (and often cheaper) R1 products end up contributing to the American industry instead of their own — a damaging trend which local licensors often struggle to combat. I admit to being one of such persons, though very few of the titles I have imported have been released domestically thus far.

Heh, same here. Paploo is absolutely correct, and my heart says the same thing. But then my wallet butts in and says "#!@< you, Heart. Lookit all them cheap, shiny R1 boxsets!".

As far as manga goes, I'm much better at buying domestically, so it evens out, kind of. Possibly.

Paploo wrote:

What he said was-

"high quality,non-streamed, non-DRM downloadable episodes. There is no legal supply.
"Anime companies jobs" are to make money. There is an unsupplied market here. There is no technical reason to leave this market unsupplied (if supply can be, and is, possible for free...)"

So basically, you both think the best business plan is to give away blu-ray quality episodes for free with no restrictions, downloadable and workable on any device. [. . .]

I think what edzieba was suggesting is that the fansub community is often able to provide fansub downloads at no cost to the downloaders. The logic was that if a bunch of amateurs can do it, a corporation should be able to provide a similar, official product and turn a profit. I don't believe he was at all suggesting that distributors shouldn't charge for their product.

Paploo wrote:

What he said was-

"high quality,non-streamed, non-DRM downloadable episodes. There is no legal supply.
"Anime companies jobs" are to make money. There is an unsupplied market here. There is no technical reason to leave this market unsupplied (if supply can be, and is, possible for free...)"

So basically, you both think the best business plan is to give away blu-ray quality episodes for free with no restrictions, downloadable and workable on any device. <rambling>

Not what I meant. Takeyo almost had it:

Takeyo wrote:

I think what edzieba was suggesting is that the fansub community is often able to provide fansub downloads at no cost to the downloaders. The logic was that if a bunch of amateurs can do it, a corporation should be able to provide a similar, official product and turn a profit. I don't believe he was at all suggesting that distributors shouldn't charge for their product.

What I meant was, the cost of creating and distributing high quality DRM-free files online is effectively zero FOR THE DISTRIBUTOR*, not that the purchase price for these need be zero. Simply provide a better product than what is available for free (the official distributors have the dual advantages of access to the episode, scripts, etc before airtime, and unfettered access to the original digital master for encoding), and people will pay.
*Easily shown by the fact that fansubbers are doing so right now. If a company has the employees and infrastructure in place to stream, they have more than enough to provide downloads that are superior to fansubs, assuming sufficient competency.

Paploo wrote:

What reason would people have to buy dvd's? What reason would they have to watch advertisement supported streams if they had commercial free, DRM-free downloads?

Physical media can hold more data than is currently feasible for digital transmission (though this is changing), but has the additional advantage of being a physical product with things that are difficult or impossible to digitally distribute: nice packaging, bonus goods, etc. You pay more for the extras, or pay less for vanilla, but nowadays for a lot of users 'a box and a plastic disc' fall under extras, not vanilla.

And why the hell WOULD people watch ad-laden version if given an alternative? The main factor is convenience. For example: distribute a DRM-laden file with unskippable adverts. All it takes is one annoyed person to remove the DRM and adverts and distribute the file, and why would anyone download the official-but-worse version? If instead you put out an non-DRM MKV with chapter breaks around the adverts, making them easily skippable, nobody will even bother to remove them and redistribute. Sure, a few may skip them, but they would have downloaded the unofficial version anyway.

Xanas wrote:

Ehh, you got me, I haven't tried the subscription stream here yet to confirm. I know Crunchyroll's regular stuff works fine, and Funi's stuff works fine, but it's possible something they have here won't work and yeah that would definitely be a big point against it since I use 64 bit Linux as my primary OS.

Ah, I guess I'm mistaken then. It's been quite a while since I last used flash on 64 bit linux, so they must have fixed it prior to the 64 bit native flash release. My bad.

Paploo wrote:

So basically, you both think the best business plan is to give away blu-ray quality episodes for free with no restrictions, downloadable and workable on any device. What reason would people have to buy dvd's? What reason would they have to watch advertisement supported streams if they had commercial free, DRM-free downloads? [I'm assuming you'd whinge if there was an unskipable Coke commerical every 8 minutes]

I know i'm abit late to the discussion, but obligatory reaction image:

Sorry folks, but edzieba used some really unspecific wording, that caused me to misread what he was saying when accompanied by his other statements.

That and other statements like this-

Sunday Silence wrote:

How can you show empathy when the companies refuse to either cater to the demands of fans, try and institute ways to beat the fansubbers/translators to the punch, or are so patently xenophobic that it'll make the Klu Klux Klan look like boy scouts?

Tend to make some comments come across a certain way. It flavours the conversation in a way I don't like, so sorry if I ranted a little, thjough I think my rants were still rooted in valid problems facing the anime industry, and takes a more realistic view on the actual market for digital stuff. [BTW- Silence, you might want to read this week's animenewsnetwork.com/brain-diving/becoming-a-manga-monkey/2010-10-12 ]

That, and again, honestly, there are issues of Underpants Gnomes Economics- sure you *could* make money from what edzieba suggests, but *how* and *is there really a market for it*.

It's hard to say how "easy" something is when it comes to digital manga or anime downloads when comparing it to pirated work- there's dozens of hope legit vendors have to jump through that they don't, and other costs that aren't apparent.

That's why Ebooks tend to still have prices that are 3/4 or so of the print edition, for example- there's still lots of work and money involved.

I think Crunchy Roll was offering pay-for-download episodes, as ADV Films had in the past, but both discontinued those services since they weren't terribly profitable or popular- it's more efficient to go with someone like Itunes downloads or Netflix or a streaming sites, since there's more money and larger audiences [which is why despite the shrunken market, dvd's are still a large profit center for anime- and given episodes cost between $1-2 in some boxsets cases, I think the majority of people putting money into their anime collection go with dvd's since it's a more tangible investment. Or just go with Itunes or Netflix, since it's more convienent and already available.]. It seems the anime market has split into "those who buy dvd's", "those who watch free-streaming" and "those who rent or buy their anime via digital services like Itunes and Netflix", which doesn't leave much room or time or reason to put out downloads that people could the turnaround and make pirated copies of with ease.

Though on that note, Disney is building a digital format that will work across multiple devices, with a license allowing you to watch a movie across different formats. There's still DRM involved in it, but a different kind, which others might look into if Disney's successful.

Anyhoo, all this has nothing to do with the reality that this was still an illegal act, and one which have a negative impact on the creators of the work. We can go on about this stuff all day, but it still doesn't escape the core truth---- this woman violated other peoples rights, and that's why she's going to prison. Manga artists and animators face this issue everyday, and fans should be more sensitive to it.

BTW--- By imports I mostly meant stuff like people importing stuff not available in their regions, or who don't have domestic anime producers, but I totally see where Zinski&Co are coming from [though from my understanding, it's perfectly legal for you to be importing this stuff so long as it's not direct from the manufacturer]. People can only do so much, so I don't see much issues with attempting to save a few bucks here and there- I mostly just think they should try to do their fair share, and not go about gloating about or glamorizing piracy, or ignoring it's negative affects. It's that extreme that I moreso take issue with.

edzieba wrote:

If instead you put out an non-DRM MKV with chapter breaks around the adverts, making them easily skippable, nobody will even bother to remove them and redistribute. Sure, a few may skip them, but they would have downloaded the unofficial version anyway.

But a large part of any advertising-funded media is the measurement of the exposure. We've had centuries of development of the commercial institutions of print advertising, and 90 years of the development of the commercial institutions of broadcast advertising, while the development of the kind of advertising that would fund freely redistributable with included skippable advertising will be in its infancy once it starts.

And the anime industry itself does not have the deep pockets to finance experiments with upfront investment required and uncertain returns over an uncertain period of time.

Crunchyroll works by leveraging existing institutions, metered advertising and user access fees, already developed by the cable industry. The second part of the system is how it can make money even in the majority of countries with very underdeveloped video streaming advertising markets.

TAN is attempting a subscription-only adjunct to its VOD cable offerings, and ANN was attempting the same kind of thing with a slight twist on the subscription terms.

It could well take a group of angel investors who had a non-DRM model of distribution that they believed in sufficiently to carry the up-front licensing costs for several years in order to get a non-DRMed download model established in this industry.

Paploo wrote:

It's hard to say how "easy" something is when it comes to digital manga or anime downloads when comparing it to pirated work- there's dozens of hope legit vendors have to jump through that they don't, and other costs that aren't apparent.

It's not particularly hard. The technical costs are as close to zero to allow anyone with a moderate internet connection and an average computer to acquire, produce, and distribute a subtitled anime episode/movie of professional quality, and likewise with scanlated manga.
Costs and delays due to ass-backward licensing cruft, however, are another matter entirely. The solution is not to shrug shoulders and shift the cost of this cruft to the customer, but to get rid of the cruft.
The alternative is not legislation, it is bankruptcy.

Paploo wrote:

That's why Ebooks tend to still have prices that are 3/4 or so of the print edition, for example- there's still lots of work and money involved.

No, ebooks are expensive because publishers are greedy. Every book printed since the advent of digital offset lithography (i.e. the last few decades) exists in digital form. Converting this digital form to one that is suitable for mass distribution is a simple process, easily automated, with minimal cost (almost all the associated cost is to pay someone to load the converted file into a reader, and read through it to check for formatting errors). The price premium for ebooks is pure profit for the publishers and distributors, for almost no cost (save a few fractions of a penny for bandwidth), with none of this extra reaching the author (who often ends up with fewer royalties from digital editions than print!).

agila61 wrote:

But a large part of any advertising-funded media is the measurement of the exposure. We've had centuries of development of the commercial institutions of print advertising, and 90 years of the development of the commercial institutions of broadcast advertising, while the development of the kind of advertising that would fund freely redistributable with included skippable advertising will be in its infancy once it starts.

An excellent point, and one that I haven't heard before. Neilsen generates it's ratings information by installing special set top boxes in a small sample of homes in exchange for free or discounted TV: I could see a similar method working here. Offer a small subset of users a proprietary player that reports usage in exchange for free or discount access. Additionally, the streaming player can also report statistics (as I suspect already occurs).

agila61 wrote:

It could well take a group of angel investors who had a non-DRM model of distribution that they believed in sufficiently to carry the up-front licensing costs for several years in order to get a non-DRMed download model established in this industry.

Unfortunately, the only way I can see a sane distribution model getting off the ground is either this, or a large swathe of license holders going under and selling off licenses for cheap to more flexible companies, and with the way things are going the latter still looks more likely.

edzieba wrote:

agila61 wrote:

It could well take a group of angel investors who had a non-DRM model of distribution that they believed in sufficiently to carry the up-front licensing costs for several years in order to get a non-DRMed download model established in this industry.

Unfortunately, the only way I can see a sane distribution model getting off the ground is either this, or a large swathe of license holders going under and selling off licenses for cheap to more flexible companies, and with the way things are going the latter still looks more likely.

But the license holders going under means losing a big swathe of the current productive capacity in the process, while the ability to generate some revenue off of licenses acquired in bankruptcy is assurance of the ability to generate sufficient revenue to finance the creation of new content.

Cutting down distribution costs does not automatically solve the problem of financing production, and there's no guarantee that it even makes a contribution.

Meanwhile, streaming within the market is growing ... even though the costs are sufficiently higher than "practically zero" that the largest bootleg hosting site could not afford to continue operating as a bootleg hosting site and the current bootleg streaming sites all rely on leeching off of other hosts ... so whatever its supposed technical limits, they are not so substantial as to prevent its growth. The "tenth place" (out of 10) title at Crunchyroll this fall would have been in the top four seasonal titles this same time last year. Its too soon to conclude that it will keep growing at the present pace over the next two or three years, but there is no direct evidence that it will hit a massive speed bump in that time span.

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