Forum - View topic

Answerman - Why Are Funimation And Crunchyroll Getting Married?

So, if you want SAME state as before announcement, you now get $2 discount. It's even better if you only wanted subs because, before this:
CR ($7) + FUNi (sub only: $5) = $12
now:
CR = $7

Again, the ONLY people who would see negative effects is people who were "FUNi only", for them, you either lose subs or pay $5 more for MORE content than before. So one could argue its STILL a "net win", but its understandable if viewed as a loss if you don't like non-FUNi content.

It's not going to hit budgets that fast. Heck the fall shows are already at some stage of production. Whatever effect this has on revenues will take longer to affect production than one month or even a few months unless these companies are really badly off.

jsevakis wrote:

Not true. The huge amount of money going into the industry from both the US and China has greatly contributed to the quantity of shows being produced. Now that the revenue is contracting, we can expect production to follow suit. We just don't know by how much.

Anime is still mostly maintained by the Japanese market. Nobody buys anime related products like the Japanese. And in the future anime will be even more dependent of Japanese market. I don't expect to be a big drop of the amount of anime produce as long as the Japanese market stay as is now. Sure there are more money now than ever from streaming abroad, but is that what driving the anime market to the number of shows per year we have now? I don't think so.
Is the Japanese market that are sustain it.

Precisely why most fall 2016 are already at some stage in production is why they will be affected. Not really romantic to be shown in shirobako, but AFAIK one of the first things they need to do is a budget, "how much will this cost?" is what the production committe needs to know, they do not write blank checks. They obviously know that companies at china and the USA buy streaming rights for big bucks and they pay upfront. So if the anime costs 100 and they expect to get at least 30 in revenue from USA+China, they will fork 70 to pay for the production process. But if due to the crunchy/funi alliance they only get 20 (including what chinese streamers pay), they are getting a budget of 90 instead of 100 and they will probably start to cut corners like crazy. As someone else mentioned in shows like grimgar (and this season qualidea code) there are episodes with plenty of still frames (probably due to some scenes not making it in time), now imagine what happens if they simply can't pay at all for those cuts required for one episode?

I'm sure some licensors will want to work with them more in order to prevent CrunchyMation (FuniRoll?) from having a total monopoly.

Oh my god! Things are way, way crazier than I anticipated. I guess companies learned nothing from the last anime bubble. I want to believe that those insane fees only apply to the My Hero Academias and One-Punch Mans. Because if those fees are close to the standard across the board, NISA will never publish anime again and Sentai will soon be forced out of the market.

The bubble in licensing isn't solely because of Netflix, Amazon, or Funi/CR competition over licenses, it's also because of the rise of China and Chinese streaming companies coming in and paying 6 figures themselves, just for asian rights.

The problem is FuniRoll could do the same to NA fans. Buy these titles at this price or you get nothing. We've got 90% of all the titles you want so you gotta pay what we say. Hopefully they don't do that because if they did start gouging prices themselves they would cause more people to go back to more illicit ways of getting their anime.

I don't see much problem with 1-2 weeks delays of simulcasts and physical released being pushed back 2-3 months. That will not be the ideal situation, but I will happily take that over the N.A. anime industry going up in flames, trying to outbid China's deep pockets.

I hope N.A companies are smart and that they don't let themselves be bullied by greedy Japanese companies.

If it was just a week or two, it wouldn't be that big of a fuel for piracy. I still remember the fansubbing era and mostly if you got the episode in two weeks from Japanese airdate, it was small miracle. Of course there were some fastsub groups, who could produce a sub within a days of Japanese release date, but their subs were usually really bad. And not only subtitle-wise, sometimes even the video and/or audio quality was bad (I remember Naruto Shippuden fansubs, who used letterboxed SD video). Not to mention you never knew if the group will actually finish the show you started to watch. So, if it was only a matter of week or two to wait for episode being done in quality subs and have the peace that the show will eventually be finished, I guess many people would still go with it, even though they may not be happy about it. If it was anything more then that, however, that may really be problem. Still, let's hope that we will not get even to those 1-2 weeks era.

I imagine the two sharing catalogues also helps protect against losing subscribers to each other, since now users will have less reason to switch between providers. One question that raises, though, is whether it means subscriber numbers are plateauing, requiring CR & Funi to move to protect the users they have as much as attempt to attract new ones. Which makes one wonder, depending precisely on how this deal plays out, if they're in danger of falling foul of anti-trust laws; not that any regulatory body is likely to care about anime.

Right now are more money coming from China but that will become less and less relevant because China is know for first buying everything from abroad until they start making their on versions later. Soon or later there will be a flood of Chinese anime-like cartoons and anime will have difficulties not only with keeping the China market and others markets too, because for sure they will be allot cheaper to license than anime.

ANN wrote:

I'm sure some licensors will want to work with them more in order to prevent CrunchyMation (FuniRoll?) from having a total monopoly.

I see you guys deleted my comment, which was the first to mention what's stated in the bold, in the CR/Funi partnership announcement article, just so you wouldn't have to source me and can claim that as your own. Well done.

But even if CR and FUNI are allowed to jointly acquire licenses, can't the Japanese licensors say "since you are now partners with more resources combined, you pay us $350,000 per episode"?

Aniplex has plenty of titles on Crunchyroll (including dubs). I wonder how they will respond to this. TBH, i'm surprised they haven't tried to force people into using Daisuki and putting their shows exclusively on that platform. I do worry that Sentai is going to be in trouble. Several of their titles are only on Hulu now and Hulu doesn't seem that interested in anime. Will they turn into Discotek and Media Blasters and stop being able to license newer shows? As a precaution, i'll probably start focusing on buying up their series that I want, just in case the worst happens. I was excited when I read about this yesterday, but now it seems like there could be downsides to it as well. Japan won't be happy about lower licensing prices, and that might make another Japanese company try to enter the American market to cut out the middle man and get the all the profits themselves. The anime market is definitely going to be different now, and only time will tell if it's a positive or a negative.

The profitability in the NA market is similar to that of Japan: The premium sets make the money, and trying to race to the gutter on pricing doesn't work. Japan settled on the pricepoint they did for a reason. Similar is true of the NA market: The ones making a comfortable profit are ones like Aniplex and Pony Canyon that offer 1-cour premium sets around the $150 pricepoint.

That runs counter to everything we've seen over the last half decade, as well as every ounce of common sense most people should have at this point. The anime industry is becoming more and more global and international every year. Justin already said in this Answerman that some shows are reaching $200k per episode. That literally nearly pays for some shows by itself! And then you have Amazon putting down, according to Justin, multi-millions(over $5m, if I remember right) for the Noitamina deal. You also have Netflix co-producing a new show, and Toonami co-producing a new show. Oh, and then you have China, which is reportedly seeing streaming numbers on their legal sites of literally 10 times what some shows are getting in Japan. And they are working with Japan to produce several China/Japan collaborations. Maybe they'll eventually make their own thing entirely, but they seem pretty happy working jointly at this point. But anyway, the market is moving more and more international. Japan is still the heart, but they are not where the future of anime is, not in the slightest. Especially not if they don't start having more babies.

Of course, the big thing is if the Chinese will be able to produce good writing for their animation. The Koreans have been struggling at this for decades despite close proximity to Japan and doing outsourced animation for both Japan and North America.