Forum

LordRobin wrote:

I'm not a subscriber to Hulu Plus, but I was under the impression that it's more than just "the Hulu website, except on TV and you gotta pay for it". Am I wrong?

With hulu + you can use Roku if you have it (but not the only way to view it on your tv depending on your setup), HD if available but it's hit and miss on programs and quality, hulu + exclusive content and the ability to watch on mobile devices via the hulu + app.

I had + for a couple of months and wasn't terribly impressed so I dropped it. Mainly, the exclusive content wasn't that great outside of the Criterion Collection and I very rarely used the app. If the ads went away with the subscription I might have talked myself in to keeping it but otherwise I couldn't justify paying for a subscription.

jr0904 wrote:

Unfortunately if everyone does that , it will hurt the sales for the companies that made them. its why anime companies are hell bent on removing fansubs , fandubs , and abridged series cause its hurts the industry in general.

Fansubs, yes, but fandubs and abridged series? Really? Most fandubs and especially abridged series are done for the purpose of affectionate and lighthearted parody, not to provide an illegal means of actually watching the show in question. They are expressions of fans' love and interest, just like fanfics or fanart, and they can even promote a series. As long as no profit is being sought, there's no harm at all in such endeavours, despite what some in the industry may think.

relentlessflame wrote:

People who could never afford the product in the first place were never potential customers for that release, so whatever they do is gravy (to some degree, anyway). But, if you devalue the product to the collectors who would otherwise be able and willing to pay the higher price, then you have a problem.

Well, that's the strategy used now for Japan and it is certainly reflected in the 2chan meme "anime is for rich people". However that also leads to the large gap I mentioned earlier between the handful of titles that actually profit off of video sales in Japan vs all the rest of the losers.

For all of the rest of the losers in video sales, there's a few orders of magnitude difference between the fanbase and part of that fanbase who have enough money to buy these comparatively B grade shows. That is, we know from the readership and/or circulation, there are at least a few or several hundreds of thousands, readers of the manga/light novel/visual novel... thus they're very likely watching the show on TV (or DVR'ing it)... and possibly downloading the rips .... and maybe even reverse importing the US version. For example: even now, there are still Japanese people buying the US BD's of Ef-Tales series and Clannad series!

Yet, out of these several hundreds of thousand of fans we know from the source material.... only a couple thousand--or less!--buy the anime version at $500 a cour, keeping in mind the competition against other shows, something they might personally "good, but not the best". These mere couple thousand buyers or less, are nowhere near enough to make the show profitable on video sales, let alone recoup costs, and this is the trend across a lot of anime.

I'm not disagreeing your assessment, of viewing anime sales as "collectors items".. but there's no diversity in business model. Even box sets of really old shows, after several years of singles are still expensive. It's fine if the market were inherently small AND most of that market were rich, like fine art collectors. But the great vast majority of your base here is poor.

Now there would be a problem if your base is poor AND if your base is also small. But we know it's not small thankfully. It's poor but large.

In fact the production committee seems to realize this too, hence the focus on other avenues of income--basically the original source material and merchandise. All of these items are also about an order of magnitude cheaper than the complete video set.

Yet.. for the losers--of otherwise liked shows with large fan base that are out-competed for the limited income by other shows--relying on that "collectors" money of Japanese video sales may turn out not to be fruitful as is often the case. So they resort to relying on increased interest in the original material, on figures, on games, on other merchandise instead.

For example, Bakuman did utterly terrible (initially ~1,500 total avg, then just absolutely tanked), so did Beelzebub (after vol. 6 it's LESS than 1,000 buyers!). Does that mean there are only 1,000 fans or less of the work itself? Of course not, and we know there are several orders of magnitude more fans! It's not just for long running shows, but regular ones that would never see a continuation too.

I mean, Ben-Tou (2,045 dvd/bd combined).. does that mean there are only 2k readers of the light novel or manga adaptation? Did only 2k people watch the show? Quite the opposite I firmly believe. It wouldn't have been made into an anime in the first place, and the LN and the manga would've been cancelled immediately with just 2,045 readers.

Mirai Nikki = 1,765 BD buyers. No way there are only 1,765 readers of the original. Real figure would be much more than 10x.. maybe closer to 100x.

hmm.. Mirai Nikki already had fanservice. But maybe some other fanservice will help? C3 Cube = 1,899 BD buyers

ok not working.. how about some other types of fanservice, this time with boobs? Dragon Crisis! = 596 BD buyers Mad

Maybe some cute, slice-of-fantasy-life moeblob, chibi humor anime? Nekogami Yaoyorozu = 325 BD buyers Shocked

Pulling this outta my ass, but I absolutely bet if you multiply Nekogami Yaoyorozu's sales figure by 100x or more and you'd get the fans, because there ain't no way an anime would've been made if there were only 325 readers of the original, nor would the original even have survived.

We even know from a producer that Nichijou "was not even close" to recouping costs. And that had an avg of ~3,500 buyers. Justin confirmed this, and so do other sites that cite actually production costs. Outside of the top 20, anime is a littered graveyard of these types or worse sellers.

Yet... what if, just assume for the moment, you could see into the future--for these "beloved losers"--that the anime indeed would be a big loser in video sales. Instead of the producers or production committee and/or sponsors, saying, "oh well, we lost big on the video. So guys, we'll be in the red for at least a few years." Turn's out we weren't the next big hit. Hopefully we can recoup costs from the manga, LNs, figures, dakimakuras, games, etc. Maybe the foreign licensing will help.

Again, for these losers only, not the big sellers, if you could predict... instead shrugging and relying on the "collectors" that did not come en masse to be anywhere close to profitable, why not just turn around and speculate, how about instead of using the same pricing as everyone else is using, use:

"You know, we've got the interest and readership... but they aren't rich" ... "If we were the only ones, then charging $500 per cour would be no problem" ... "But we're up against some really stiff competition this year from other titles"

"Based on some survey's and market research, we likely won't pull their $500 away from what they'll spend on other shows" ... "Definitely won't happen at $400 either.... probably not at $300... If they;re wavering over $500 they'll still waver over $300---remember our readers are poor"

"So why not just go all out and undercut the competition?" ... "Hey, it's either 1,000 buyers or less Mad

out of 500,000+ readers" ... "Or at a crazy cheap price, possibly 300,000 buyers" .. "At that volume we'd do much better than just those 1000 buyers"

"It's a risk, but there's already an even larger risk at the default strategy everyone else is using!" ... "And this really cheap price + orders magnitude higher volume would not detract them from buying merchandise either!" ... "The default strategy risk is lose BIG on video sales + moderate merchandise" ... "This strategy is moderate, maybe just about break even on video sales + moderate merchandise"

Why instead of hoping you'll be the next K-On, the next JoJo's adventure, the next Bakemonogatari, etc, and price your show exactly the same as them according to that hope of even getting half of they do, when it turns out the anime landscape in video sales is most all-or-nothing...

Why not speculate that you will NOT even get close to being a big hit, that you will NOT even get half their sales, even with 30% reduction... and take a drastically different approach, instead of something that is for much of anime history now a known risk. When you've got 10 sure fire hits, and another 10 pretty good hits as the competition, the probabilities are not on your side!

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Back in the US, as I mentioned before even Aniplex does not put all their eggs into the import pricing basket. If it's constantly more profitable, there would be no reason at all for them to stop selling the import version of Fate/Zero and do a costly dub re-release, relatively soon, at a much lower relative price. (a bit over 1/3 the import JP price).

They had success with Kara no Kyoukai's BD import. Why release a cheap DVD version? Why didn't they just do an import version of Madoka TV? Why go through the expense of a dub and the relatively cheaper LE set ($275 -- in between JP and US) and the much cheaper regular edition?

Bakemonogatari and Nisemonogatari -- this time, no dub, but it's even less at about 1/3 JP price for the US release. Again, Nise is relatively soon too. No import this time.

Quote:

If you want to use an analogy, it's like how crowd-funded projects (i.e. Kickstarter) have rewards depending on the amount you donate. People who contribute more usually get better rewards than people who contribute less. And to a certain degree, given that the world is increasingly connected, there needs to be something to keep that distinction in place as long as the anime industry is relying so much on their top-spenders to fund things.

Let me relate my experience. I really, seriously, wanted to fund Black Jack's DVD release on AnimeSols. And possibly Yatterman as a lower priority. But it's coming close to the deadline, and I wanted to see at least one succeed. For me, after a lot of thought, I decided to put everything into Creamy Mami. All the other shows lost out on my money, even though I do NOT want them to loose!

(edit: I decided to pledge some for Black Jack after all)

I have put a lot of money into crowdfudning Kick-Heart, into Time of Eve, and into Little Witch Academia (which I hope will also reach $500k) and DMP's Barabara and others. However this forced me to significantly cut back on anime spending I normally spend on. Gonna have to hold back on buying Aniplex releases now too.

Will also hold back on other crowdfunding if they don't have momentum. I can't pledge a large sum to help them along like I normally do. I would only be one of the regular folks going along for the ride, on the lower tiers for the bare item.

I appreciate crowdfunding, but it's not something I want to do often as large backer AT ALL. Quite frankly it would be much more pleasant just going along for the ride with a project of large volume of small backers, rather than debating large, big choices--sacrificies-- to be part of the "elite" that I've done so far. I hate it, because there are many things I like. I suppose the one good thing is that it forces me to wait for a sales moment for things I've put off for another year or so.

-- sorry for the wall o' text

Zac wrote:

Ask Justin, he can tell you if you're right or wrong.

Simple question, if I may be blunt, "WTF is the POINT of this statement?"

To clarify my question let's review how we got here:
-Someone asked Justin (as answerman) a question about the industry
-Justin answered the question the first person asked
-Someone else does not agree with Justin's information

So,, just again, what is the POINT of saying "ask Justin"? Do I think Justin knows what he is talking about? yes. Do I think Justin has inside information that many other people do not? yes. The whole point of the column is for Justin to answer reader questions. And with Eve we have someone that didn't want to accept Justin's answer. One would think the options here are to either ignore Eve, or (as others have done) try to enhance Justin's information so that Eve will understand the realities that Justin presented.

I'm just saying Justin doesn't have time (from everything I've seen/read) to play answerman on the forums (if he did, why bother with the column) and in Answerman feedback people are responding to his answers, so why should the first option to forum discussion be "ask Justin"? I'm sorry, but that just seems COMPLETELY redundant.

YamadaKun wrote:

Reverse importation is bullshit and has never happened. If I go to Amazon.JP and search for some popular anime that happens to be released in both countries, I'll notice that the R1 rank will in the 10000s, while the JP anime will be in the 10s or 100s.

It varies by title. It's fairly common for North American releases to be ranked higher than Japanese releases by the time the North American release comes out, e.g. just grabbing a random recent one:

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia
North American version
http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00BKBCLK0
Amazon anime video ranking: 964th place
Amazon anime Blu-ray ranking: 1423rd place
Japanese vol. 1
http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B007Q36LXY
Amazon anime video ranking: 6669th place
Amazon anime Blu-ray ranking: 2471st place

The NA version is ranked significantly higher...at this particular point in time. But of course, most people who would be buying the Japanese release already bought it by this point, so it's only natural that the newer NA release will rank higher.

configspace wrote:

"So why not just go all out and undercut the competition?" ... "Hey, it's either 1,000 buyers or less Mad

out of 500,000+ readers" ... "Or at a crazy cheap price, possibly 300,000 buyers" .. "At that volume we'd do much better than just those 1000 buyers"

"It's a risk, but there's already an even larger risk at the default strategy everyone else is using!" ... "And this really cheap price + orders magnitude higher volume would not detract them from buying merchandise either!" ... "The default strategy risk is lose BIG on video sales + moderate merchandise" ... "This strategy is moderate, maybe just about break even on video sales + moderate merchandise"

Why instead of hoping you'll be the next K-On, the next JoJo's adventure, the next Bakemonogatari, etc, and price your show exactly the same as them according to that hope of even getting half of they do, when it turns out the anime landscape in video sales is most all-or-nothing...

Justin basically answered this point in this very article (and in the Anime Economy series): who the hell wants to own anime on disc, really? There isn't this infinitely deep well of people who might just consider buying if the price were right, and cutting the price in half isn't going to double the amount of buyers. Your whole premise is based on the assumption that, the lower the price, the higher percent of "conversion" you'll have, up to an extremely high percentage of the source material readership or of TV viewership, but I don't think there is any evidence to support this. We can safely assume that they came up with this balance because it was shown over time to maximize profits.

But that aside, anime production is a sunk cost, and home video is just one of many avenues used to recoup that investment. So if the discs don't sell, it doesn't mean they "lose big" on video sales unless they over-estimated demand and manufactured too many discs. Not recouping the investment through video sales means they need to make it up through other means, like increased sales of the source material, CDs, magazines/art books, video games, event tickets, foreign market licensing, or various licensed merchandise. And again, the audience for each of these different things may not overlap. (Granted that the sales of different forms of merchandise may benefit different players in the production committee to different degrees, but home video tends to be done by one of the big players anyway.)

I should say that, to a certain degree, there is already some price elasticity in the Japanese anime market. Longer-running shounen shows and certain fare targeted at difference audiences have pricing models that are either cheaper, and/or feature more episodes per disc. (Some of these shows still aren't even released on Blu-Ray, because they figured their audience won't want it.) But these shows still tend to not sell that well even with these "concessions", because the audience doesn't necessarily want to buy discs, and these productions don't necessarily depend on disc sales as an important way to recoup their initial investment.

For shows that are aimed at the hardcore collector market, long-term price stability seems preferable than chasing short-term gains. Constantly undercutting your regular prices to try to bring people in the door is a bit of a "desperation move", and doesn't necessarily speak well of the product's value or quality (it makes the release seem "cheap", in the bad sense). It's good as a promotional strategy (like Nana's 777 yen volume 1), but not what you want to be messing with all the time -- particularly when the evidence suggests there's a floor to the market anyway, and you're not necessarily going to gain buyers in equal proportion to the amount you lower the price (to bring things back around to the point Justin made in the first place). If you understand that the buying market is mostly hardcore collectors, it's probably better to keep the price, but increase the collector's value by adding limited extras and exclusive rewards.

As for the points about Aniplex USA, as I said before, it seems to me that they've been struggling to find the right balancing point (timeliness, price, features, similarity to Japanese release, etc.), but perhaps it's easier to ask this question to Justin and let him chase them down for an answer "straight from the horse's mouth". (I have read interviews in the past where they've alluded to this, though.)

The real answer to why DVDs are so freakin' expensive in Japan, whether it is an obscure anime or a popular tv show or anime is still not clear. It seems this Answerman forgot the fact that people in Japan actually do rent videos. I can understand not buying to own, considering space is a premium, when you can clutter up your room with comics instead, but there's gotta be some kind of other thing that's leaving the prices still exorbitantly high.

Slightly OT but I've heard that CD's are popular rent in Japan, with renters oftern recording or ripping from songs them.

angryrider wrote:

The real answer to why DVDs are so freakin' expensive in Japan, whether it is an obscure anime or a popular tv show or anime is still not clear.

You have some product that you can mass produce in any amount that you want, from 1 to 1 million. You KNOW that you have about 100 people that want to buy your product. Of those 100, 80 will buy it at ANY price up to $1000, 20 will only buy it if it's $50 or less. So, you can either make 100 copies and sell ALL of them at $50/copy = $5,000. Or you can make 80 copies and sell all of THOSE at $1,000/copy = $80,000. Which would you do?

But to answer your base question of "why do they charge so much for DVDs in Japan?" the answer is obviously "because they CAN". (I say that because if companies in the US could get away with charging $80/disk, they'd do it IN A HEARTBEAT, heck, why do you think they're shoving 3D movies down our throats?)

angryrider wrote:

The real answer to why DVDs are so freakin' expensive in Japan, whether it is an obscure anime or a popular tv show or anime is still not clear. It seems this Answerman forgot the fact that people in Japan actually do rent videos. I can understand not buying to own, considering space is a premium, when you can clutter up your room with comics instead, but there's gotta be some kind of other thing that's leaving the prices still exorbitantly high.

Obviously you haven't read the "Anime Economy part 2" carefully.

Quote:

The prices actually stem from a business practice we used to have in America, too: rental pricing. Basically, back in the dawn of the home video business, the industry was constructed in a way where "niche" releases were only meant to sell a few thousand copies, mostly to video rental shops...

Quote:

...Only the hardcore fans of a particular product will usually want to bother owning a tape or DVD, and everyone else relies on rental shops. Media is a specialty market, not a mass-market one, so prices have stayed astronomically high.

Yes, DVD rental exists in Japan (although with reduced extras, and I've heard tell of gimped video too) but that doesn't change the fact that the discs on sale are for collectors who won't be satisfied with just renting it - and will have seen it on TV already anyway.