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Bandai Entertainment Responds to ANNCast Comments


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Blood-
Bargain Hunter



Joined: 07 Mar 2009
Posts: 23669
PostPosted: Sun May 09, 2010 8:20 am Reply with quote
Keonyn wrote:
Well, it would be a problem for me to be honest. That's not to say I'd cease buying anime if it went the sub only route, but my willingness to buy it would drop significantly, and I'd probably only buy must haves.


Pretty much in line with this. There are some shows I'd buy no matter what (i.e. Toradora!) and then there are others I'd only buy if dubbed, i.e. The Sacred Blacksmith (which, fortunately for me, Funi has licensed so it will get a dub).
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
Posts: 3213
Location: NE Ohio
PostPosted: Sun May 09, 2010 11:01 am Reply with quote
poehitman wrote:
Do you realize how condescending sub-only fans are when they talk down to me like I'm some lowly thief stealing kids lollipops. I'm not watching some low quality you-tube stream when I can watch a higher quality fansub download.


Do you realize that you are putting all sub-only fans into a single stereotype based on the absurd attitudes of some?

Quote:
And do you people actually think we're ripping off the creator? At worst, we're ripping off the production company, though we aren't ripping anyone off at all.


That is an argument that is complete BS. If you are ripping off the production company, you are ripping off the content creators. They work piece rate, and less anime produced is less income for them.

Ever since the start of legit streaming, the old 2005 "but I'll buy the DVD when it comes out" argument split into those shows that stream and those that do not. And that is how we know the large majority of the torrent and leech streaming sites were just using that as a cover story - because they keep on competing head to head with legit streams.

If you are watching a fansub bootleg that is competing head to head with a legit stream, of course you are ripping off the content creators. You are only ripping them off a dime or a quarter per series, but there's such a thing as being nickle and dimed to death.
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Kikaioh



Joined: 01 Jun 2009
Posts: 1205
Location: Antarctica
PostPosted: Sun May 09, 2010 12:13 pm Reply with quote
agila61 wrote:
Kikaioh wrote:
It's disappointing to see long-time distributors like Central Park and A.D. Vision closing up shop, and I'd hate to hear the same happen for Bandai.


ADV dodged the bullet, at the expense of restructuring into several pieces, but they are still working and still putting out anime, as Sentai/Section23 now.

See: Sentai Filmworks Adds Guin Saga Fantasy TV Anime


Hey, thanks for the information on Section 23! It seems I've been out of the news loop in regards to this, it's great to hear that they survived in an alternate form. I used to run an anime club when I was in college, and ADV had a very nice program where they'd regularly send us episodes of anime that we could show during our meetings. I feel quite a bit of gratitude to them for that.

Quote:
And do you people actually think we're ripping off the creator? At worst, we're ripping off the production company, though we aren't ripping anyone off at all.


Again, if you're watching fansubs, you're supporting the idea that anyone and everyone has the right to copy and distribute the creator's works without permission ~ you're supporting the idea that the creators do not have the right to control the conditions under which the works that they created are copied and distributed. So yes, you are ripping off the original creators.
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bayoab



Joined: 06 Oct 2004
Posts: 831
PostPosted: Sun May 09, 2010 12:15 pm Reply with quote
Deadwing wrote:
KanjiiZ wrote:
Seven sub only episodes for thirty dollars and about 50 episodes in the whole series? That's the stupidest price I have ever heard of.


Seven episodes for $30? That's a damn good deal if you ask me.

That's the TRSI price, not the MSRP so it's not a good deal. Hayate is $40 MSRP over 8 releases ($320 total). If it had been done in the 5 ep/$30 singles, it would have been $300 or $330 and 4 ep/$30 singles is $390. (Note that 4ep/$25 = $325) It is priced basically as dubbed singles and it doesn't even have a dub.
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
Posts: 3213
Location: NE Ohio
PostPosted: Sun May 09, 2010 1:15 pm Reply with quote
bayoab wrote:
Deadwing wrote:
KanjiiZ wrote:
Seven sub only episodes for thirty dollars and about 50 episodes in the whole series? That's the stupidest price I have ever heard of.


Seven episodes for $30? That's a damn good deal if you ask me.

That's the TRSI price, not the MSRP so it's not a good deal. Hayate is $40 MSRP over 8 releases ($320 total). If it had been done in the 5 ep/$30 singles, it would have been $300 or $330 and 4 ep/$30 singles is $390. (Note that 4ep/$25 = $325) It is priced basically as dubbed singles and it doesn't even have a dub.


The question for sub-only singles is what the market sales volume would be at various price points. If the business model was an initial run and then DVD-on-demand to keep it in print, $10 on Amazon would be selling DVD-on-demand at cost ($5/single + 45% of price for merchandising), so the two low price points would be $15 for $3.30 net revenue per disk and $20 for $6.05 net revenue per disk. Triplepacks would have a DVD-OD break-even cost of $20 at Amazon, and $30 a likely price point.

Then the eg RightStuf price would be $10 or $14 for the singles.

Either that is a substantially bigger sales volume combined with substantially lower restock and return losses compared to the retail channel, or else some other distribution has covered the fixed license and localization costs and the DVD run is only covering the DVD mastering costs and a low per title license royalty.

And of course any low price point comes at the cost of a delayed released compared to Japanese volumes (subtitles can always be turned off) ... 30 days after release of the initial Japanese volume with one or more episodes on this disk, at least.
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luffypirate



Joined: 06 Oct 2006
Posts: 3186
PostPosted: Sun May 09, 2010 9:11 pm Reply with quote
Fry's Electronics is having a buy one get one Bandai sale for anyone that's interested. Figured this would be a good place to put the word out Wink Go get some Hayate for super cheap, you cheapies.
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nailszz6



Joined: 18 Jun 2005
Posts: 10
PostPosted: Mon May 10, 2010 12:04 am Reply with quote
RestlessOne wrote:
I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but wouldn't this confuse children or be impossible for them to watch? Not only would they constantly be hearing Japanese, Spanish, French, and whatever else possibly within one or two days, but many of them aren't going to have the reading capabilities to pick up on subtitles. Dora the Explorer, for instance; it's aimed at young children, and often changed in dubs so kids can learn English, because learning Spanish is only helpful to a handful of countries. Not to mention those with dyslexia and such. I'd say that perfect world is faulted. It's fine to want things always available with subs, but it's best for people who are older and dubs should always be available for those who have a hard time with subs.


Honestly, children (that can't read well yet) are too young for anime. Tell me one anime from Japan aimed at children that hasn't been censored, or edited for US TV broadcast. Trust me, one doesn't exist. I'd honestly be perfectly happy with no subs either, just raw domestic releases (because they are so cheap). However as most people in this country do not know Japanese, subtitles are warranted as a minimum modification to the original creation. This actually bothered me more when everything was VHS, however now that DVDs have the option to turn subs on and off, it's even better..
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poehitman



Joined: 24 Oct 2005
Posts: 93
PostPosted: Wed May 12, 2010 12:51 pm Reply with quote
agila61 wrote:
poehitman wrote:
Charred Knight wrote:
But the problem is that this goes beyond free advertisement, you claim that fansubs don't represent lost revenue, what do you say to all those people who room is full of hundreds of disc of anime who just downloads everything.

It was lost revenue for me, as I didn't buy a single dvd during my fansub watching days.


Do you honestly think the majority of people who download fansubs would be running out to buy DVD's if fansubs didn't exist? Maybe, 10% I'd guess. So yeah, they do lose some revenue, but what they make back with sales of people who learned about an anime through fansubs is probably at least double what they'd lose.


Except ... the "make it back" argument has no evidence to back it up, and quite simple and straightforward evidence to knock it down.

Fansub downloads have been expanding, and the revenue from sales of media has been shrinking. Its straightforward that if they were really getting a net benefit from the fansubs, then as more and more fansubs were distributed, that net benefit would show up on the bottom line.

The two possibilities that are possible under the most obvious and basic real world evidence are (1) it has no impact and (2) it hurts. The "it helps" possibility comes from some world that works differently from our world.

However, the fansub downloads are really a side issue. The main issue is leech streaming, which competes directly head to head against both legit streaming and licensed DVD's. Restricting themselves to finished series and omitting titles licensed by a set of companies - as one torrent site does - would hurt their ranking on the leech stream aggregators and so all the big ones directly and actively take money out of the revenues going to the content creators.


You don't know for a fact that the "make it back" argument is wrong. We're in the middle of a global recession, and anime is a luxury. When in the middle of a recession, luxury items are the first things to go, so it stands to reason there would be a significant drop in anime sales. For all you know, the drop could be even worse without those buying anime who can currently afford it that found anime via fansubbing. The point is, neither of us know for sure at this time in the recession. But when the economy recovers and people have more disposable income, I guarantee they make back more.

And lots of people continue to make the mistake that every fansub downloaded is a lost sale. Since I won't buy anything sub only, even if fansubs didn't exist, it's not a lost sale with me, and I'd bet money that it's the same with a lot of other people too.
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RestLessone



Joined: 02 Aug 2009
Posts: 1426
Location: New York
PostPosted: Wed May 12, 2010 1:05 pm Reply with quote
nailszz6 wrote:
RestlessOne wrote:
I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but wouldn't this confuse children or be impossible for them to watch? Not only would they constantly be hearing Japanese, Spanish, French, and whatever else possibly within one or two days, but many of them aren't going to have the reading capabilities to pick up on subtitles. Dora the Explorer, for instance; it's aimed at young children, and often changed in dubs so kids can learn English, because learning Spanish is only helpful to a handful of countries. Not to mention those with dyslexia and such. I'd say that perfect world is faulted. It's fine to want things always available with subs, but it's best for people who are older and dubs should always be available for those who have a hard time with subs.


Honestly, children (that can't read well yet) are too young for anime. Tell me one anime from Japan aimed at children that hasn't been censored, or edited for US TV broadcast. Trust me, one doesn't exist. I'd honestly be perfectly happy with no subs either, just raw domestic releases (because they are so cheap). However as most people in this country do not know Japanese, subtitles are warranted as a minimum modification to the original creation. This actually bothered me more when everything was VHS, however now that DVDs have the option to turn subs on and off, it's even better..


But that's not what you said:
nailszz6 wrote:
In my perfect world, I do not want redubbing of "ANY" media form, from one language to any alternate language. I want the Japanese, and other countries to watch Avatar subbed, not redubbed. I honestly don't care about release dates, or release speed. This is about not modifying an original creation, not money/release time etc..


Any media form (that can be dubbed and subbed): Movies, TV shows, animation, video games, and some miscellaneous stuff. Meaning, everything from Watchmen (a rated R remake of a popular American comic) to Dora the Explorer (originally intended for young children near large Spanish-speaking communities) would be subbed. This also means all materials originally in English wouldn't be subbed. And how about Ponyo? It's actually a family-oriented movie, but it's supposed to be suitable for children, and part of the marketing had to do with attracting children. Also, we really don't get that many anime series, anyway...Other than names and maybe some kana, I don't think Hamtaro was censored.

Also, it's not like Japan doesn't mess with releases of American cartoons. They change a lot, too, either "just 'cause" or to attract a larger audience. And sometimes we just don't know. Transformers cartoon, anyone?

And you still didn't mention anything about people with dyslexia, learning disabilities, or eye problems. It's easy to say "too bad for them" or "then they should just learn Japanese", but that's not fair at all.
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Ryo Hazuki



Joined: 01 Jan 2008
Posts: 363
Location: Finland
PostPosted: Wed May 12, 2010 3:13 pm Reply with quote
RestlessOne wrote:

Also, it's not like Japan doesn't mess with releases of American cartoons. They change a lot, too, either "just 'cause" or to attract a larger audience. And sometimes we just don't know. Transformers cartoon, anyone?


Transformers is a very bad example in my opinion because many Transformers series are Japanese although the first one is American but animated in Japan.

I don't think westerners should be that conserned about the Japanese editing American cartoons because they usually stay in Japan whereas if an American company edits anime or some times live-action movies (Miramax) in the worse case rest of the western world will suffer with the US, for example Finnish television broadcasts 4Kids! versions of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and some other series and Finnish subtitled Dragon Ball Z was the Ocean Group dub.

Digimon Adventure and Digimon Adventure 02 were luckily imported straight from Japan but 4Kids! still gave Finland Digimon the Movie and Harmony Gold's rape of the first Macross series is in some countries the only version of the show available to purchase which doesn't make sense because it was edited specifically for the American kids in the 80's not with the Finnish 00's anime fans in mind.

I don't have any problems with dubbing kids shows and fortunately in Finland theaters show both the subtitled versions of animated movies at least in the bigger cities.
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RestLessone



Joined: 02 Aug 2009
Posts: 1426
Location: New York
PostPosted: Wed May 12, 2010 3:25 pm Reply with quote
^
It's more the notion that it's only America (well, and some other European countries) that are making the edits. For Transformers, I believe the edits ranged from changing genders to messing around with episode order. It doesn't affect the West, but it should be noted. Also, even if it began in Japan, editing/censoring a series on official releases is never right. (TV is one thing, but DVD and Blu-Ray are different)

Currently, most series are released unedited and anime isn't shown that often on major kids networks, except for DBZ Kai on Nicktoons and Naruto on DisneyXD. Also, foreign companies never have to go through America to get anime; they could go directly to the uncensored source. It's annoying, but those companies should hold the blame if they decide to go for the edited version over the unedited. However, it's possibly that Japanese companies condone edits in order to garner a larger viewing audience, depending on an edited series' popularity within the US. So, I suppose there is a possibility that the Japanese company asked for the censored version to be used.

I think there might be a theater around here which occasionally shows subtitled movies, though I never know which ones. I know the theaters exist, but are much more common in areas of larger population. And they are usually for live-action films, rather than animation.
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Ryo Hazuki



Joined: 01 Jan 2008
Posts: 363
Location: Finland
PostPosted: Wed May 12, 2010 3:59 pm Reply with quote
RestlessOne wrote:
^
Currently, most series are released unedited and anime isn't shown that often on major kids networks, except for DBZ Kai on Nicktoons and Naruto on DisneyXD. Also, foreign companies never have to go through America to get anime; they could go directly to the uncensored source. It's annoying, but those companies should hold the blame if they decide to go for the edited version over the unedited.


I know that sometimes broadcasters might just be lazy to not buy shows straight from Japan but some European or American licensors might own of some series rights for certain areas like Harmony Gold owns the distribution rights for the first Macross series outside Japan and Italian Panini owns European TV rights (and apparently streaming rights fro FMA Brotherhood) for Full Metal Alchemist anime series which was fortunately shown subtitled and un-edited on Finnish tv.
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