Forum - View topicWhy Don't Streaming Sites Work Together?
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reinux
Posts: 10 |
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The thing is, a little bit of jumping is fine and bound to happen in any industry. It's when it's systematic swiping like it is with Amazon that it starts to get bad for consumers, and in the long term, for producers. |
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TnKtRk
Posts: 183 |
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that 'swiping' as you call it involves two parties agreeing on it. Unless you have proof/source that strong arm tactics were involved.
Way I see it, two private for-profit corporations agreeing to a business deal. And us paying customers having the freedom to like it or not by using our wallets to support/or not those decisions. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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Well, it’s not just Amazon. CR temporarily had an exclusivity agreement with Kadokowa, so they appear to have ended up with the last season of Fate/Kaleid Prisma. So not only did streaming platforms that previously streamed the show not get it, but the show still has no home video release or dub (which Sentai did for previous seasons.). The home video collectors for that really got screwed. The same happened with Saiyuki, and Food Wars. So it’s not like Amazon is the only one doing it. Also, it’s hardly likely this is something new. ADV nabbed the second season of Ah My Goddess, after Media Blasters released the first. ADV did Saiyuki, while Geneon did Saiyuki Reload and Gunlock, and Sentai did Gaiden. Aniplex has taken follow up seasons to several of its shows, and even switched their streaming platforms. Crunchyroll also nabbed the new Kino’s Journey, while ADV had the original season and streamed it on different platforms. |
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reinux
Posts: 10 |
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I doubt there's any strong-arming going on. What I've been saying though is that they simply have orders of magnitude more money than the competitors, and in a bidding situation, that's an absolute advantage. The producers put it up for bidding, so money talks, not parties.
The reason this is a problem with Amazon more than it is with other companies, aside from the fact that Amazon simply has overwhelming finances, is that they don't have a stake in the industry or the market. They likely aren't even making money on it, just using it to prop up Prime. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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I was saying that it’s really not more of a problem with Amazon. It’s happened just as often with CR, and probably happened more often with them this past season. CR nabbed several shows that Sentai streamed and released in past seasons, including Food Wars. And Prime itself is not a money maker for Amazon. It never has been. They lose money on just the two day shipping for most Prime Members. That’s before you factor in the video streaming, music, Prime special deals, etc. They ultimately make money because Prime members are more likely to frequently shop Amazon and buy merchandise from them. Overall, Amazon’s profit margins are very slim, as are most retailers. The most profitable part of the company is actually its web services and cloud computing businesses, which interestingly host most major video streaming sites. If Amazon really wanted to monopolize anime streaming in the US, they could easily do so. So far, they’ve been fairly selective in the shows they’ve picked up. They’ve given no indications that they want to dominate the field. It appears they are just trying to bulk up their Channels offerings, and increasing Prime members buy into their digital services. Thy have the money to do what they want, but they are mostly going the “quality over quantity” route, instead of just grabbing as many licenses as they can. |
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Ushio
Posts: 630 |
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Competition only matters when you have multiple companies offering the same product. If they all have different products then having multiple suppliers just jacks up the cost.
edit You know what Mr Sevakis I'll go one step further by saying that having all anime on one streaming service is better competition for consumers than having multiple ones. I don't give a shit about the anime studios just like I don't care if Ford or Toyota makes money this year. I care about value for money for myself these companies are not our friends. A single streaming service is cheaper for me than having multiple so better for me. Having 3 stores in my town selling Pepsi doesn't cost me anything multiple streaming sites do. A single streaming service forces the anime studios to release quality product every time so that consumers choose there anime to watch at a trusted level of quality over choosing other studios who may release cheap rubbish. To me is beneficial consumer competition not multiple streaming services. Last edited by Ushio on Wed Oct 11, 2017 7:08 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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reinux
Posts: 10 |
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Food Wars has been on CR since two seasons ago (Season 1), actually. If it was also on Sentai, it was probably never an exclusive. Of course, Prime may or may not itself make money, but again, that's the problem with Amazon: they don't have a stake in anything. Even if they operate it at a loss, they can still lure enough people into their commerce to knock out B&M businesses. Incentivize Prime, and you incentivize Amazon.com, even without partaking in any kind of actual risk. I won't get into a debate about subtitle quality, but when Amazon says "quality," they don't mean quality in terms of the value they're adding; they just mean "quality" in terms of what they're licensing. And that's zero-sum: For every show Amazon licenses, there's one less for the other sites. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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[quote="reinux”]
Food Wars has been on CR since two seasons ago (Season 1), actually. If it was also on Sentai, it was probably never an exclusive.[/quote] Exactly. It was simulcast or delaycast on several sites, including Anime Network, Hulu, Viewster, And TubiTV. CR effectively locked it down to one service, after it had been non-exclusive in the past. I used it as an example of CR nabbing exclusives in the same way that Amazon had, including cases where the show was streamed somewhere else. Your previous statements made it sound like you believed that only Amazon was doing this, when CR was doing it as well. And as I said, the switching of seasons from one company to the other has been going on since the VHS and DVD days. It’s really not anything new. Whoever offers the most money or the best deal gets the show. That’s not something that’s likely to change. |
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reinux
Posts: 10 |
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Did it become an exclusive, or did other distributors simply stop buying it? I'm not familiar with the details of that show, though I would wager a guess that license prices overall are already being jacked up. Either way, I never said or intended to say that Amazon is the only one doing exclusives, or that switching doesn't happen. Crunchyroll obviously has a lot of exclusives, as does everyone else, as far as I know. It's not whether or not it happens, but how it happens and how much it happens. What I'm saying is that when a competitor like Amazon enters the market, with zero stake and way too much money, the situation turns from not-so-great to pretty-terrible, and the whole idea that "more competition is always better" simply starts to break down. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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This is my basic problem with the streaming sites; it's not competition in any meaningful way from the consumer point of view. If I want to buy a show on Blu-ray, I can go to this shop, or that shop, or that other shop. If I want to stream a show, it's that one site or nothing. It's a little bit like when Melbourne's train system was privatised; it was split in half and sold to two different companies, with the public being told that two companies means there's competition and that's a good thing. Except it's not competition at all; if I want to catch a train down this line, it's this company I have to deal with, I can't choose which company's service to go with.
We would wind up with dozens of half-baked and barely-working separate streaming solutions. And no guarantee against region restrictions or stupid pricing. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4570 |
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I don't think you've spent enough time around gamers. A lot of people were extremely annoyed when EA started making their titles exclusive to their own Origin service, and I don't know a single person who enjoys needing to create a useless UPlay account for Ubisoft's library, even when playing them through Steam. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a decent number of people just decided to pirate those titles instead. The majority of PC gamers want everything in one Lord Gaben-run place. More on-topic, I remember when streaming was new and we all had visions of this amazing place where every show in history would be available forever for us to enjoy, maybe even for free. And now...well, it honestly sucks about as much as cable, and at least there you're not paying every single network separately. At this point I'm content being an old fart and sticking with plain linear TV. |
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zrnzle500
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Yeah but with cable, you are more likely than not paying more for cable than streaming services. I care less about how many services the payments are split across than how much I pay for it. People complain about paying $100 a year for Prime, but I pay nearly that much to the cable company every month, and I barely watch linear TV. No matter how many anime streaming services you are paying for, it is almost certainly less than than what the cable company charges so I don't see why having it all in one place makes the cable companies better or no worse than the totality of the anime streaming services, unless one is writing and mailing checks to each oneself. It does make one question those that think that making cable a la carte would make it much cheaper. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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No one is saying that “more competition is always better”. In any market, there can come a point where there are simply too many players, and this often leads to consolidation. What many have been saying, is that for a long period CR’s only real competition was illegal streaming sites. Until recently, they had no real, commercial competition. Funimation’s service has always been unreliable and subpar, and The Anime Network had similar issues as well. Netflix wasn’t much of a player until fairly recently either. While Amazon isn’t perfect, it doesn’t give CR some commercial competition, especially in the simulcast region. It also gives Sentai someone to work with and prevents Funimation from becoming a defacto monopoly in the home video market. Amazon has also added features which other services have adopted, allowing some improvements across the board. As Justin said, monopolies tend to get lazy with no competitors to keep them on their toes. Amazon picking up a relatively small amount of titles each season may be an inconvenience for subscribers, but’s it hardly damaging to CR or the market as a whole. It’s no more damaging than CBS not airing their shows on NBC, HBO not putting their stuff on Showtime, or Netflix not airing Hulu shows. The only thing it has probably accomplished, is preventing Funi and CR pushing down licensing costs like their partnership had hoped to do. Whether or not the anime market will continue to grow at a pace that maintains the current licensing costs is an answer we won’t know for some time. |
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reinux
Posts: 10 |
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You'd be surprised. Consolidation doesn't happen when there are too many players; it happens when there's one competitor that, for one reason or another, has too much money and/or clout, and takes on a strategy that would either tank the company or lead them to asymptotic growth. I'm not sure Amazon's been giving Crunchyroll actual competition. Anime Strike barely even comes up on Google or Google News, except mostly on this site, to announce the season's lineup. People have hardly even written to rant about it since that one article by Forbes in May. Amazon would only be shaking up an imminent monopoly if they could actually compete for *market share*, not for *licenses*. Otherwise they're just being a thorn in the side for the sake of ticking off another box on Prime's resume. I think the general sentiment that piracy is going to make a comeback as a result of Anime Strike is true. The fact that they only serve the US is more than an "inconvenience." |
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zrnzle500
Posts: 3767 |
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HIDIVE gets many of the Sentai ones outside the US, and Amazon's own are available on regular Prime Video outside the US, and some other companies have some Strike titles in different regions as well. There are definitely some that fall through the cracks and their service can be very bad in some regions, but the Anime Strike catalog is available outside the US. |
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