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NEWS: America's 2009 Anime Market Pegged at US$2.741 Billion

and your honestly going to pretend that the American anime market is doing fine?

so far this year there are not much titles released that warrent me buying them - I look for interesting stories, art quality and rewatch value.
FMA, Guin saga, Eden of the east movies, Highschool of the Dead, and the rest of Gundam 00 are so far the only titles i think i will be buying this year.
sometimes it makes me wonder who choose the titles that are being released, every season there is usually 2 shows that are unique, yet are not picked for US distribution - with dubbing that is.

I am pretty sure that's not the answer on how to save the anime industry. Personally I think it's only a matter of time before the anime industry collapses. There is simply not enough people willing to make even miniscule sacrifices like watching anime on hulu instead of downloading it.

yuna49 wrote:

Intriguingly, moe~ shows hardly appear anywhere on the list at all. Clannad Complete Collection, for instance, ranks around 170th.

And Clannad After Story Complete Collection ranks 41st as of now.

And the only anime series ahead of it that hasn't appeared on cable TV is Claymore and Hetalia. I'd say that's pretty good, particularly since it's just a DVD collection

One thing to understand is that those positions are only for a short period of time. As far as I know, there's no long-term top 100 sales chart of anything in Amazon.

People thought the exact same thing of the music industry around the 1999-2003 era when Napster and Limewire were "ruining" it with downloads. ...

From a business standpoint, iTunes' success brings up a very important point; people *want* to pay for what they own, for their possessions. ...

I think the anime industry has fallen behind the times, and it kind of baffles me as to why. People are streaming their movies and television, downloading books on ereaders, and paying for it all happily. I myself have held off on buying an ereader as I wait to see which one the manga industry decides to go with.

I have several manga series that are incomplete and out of print. These titles could make their respective publishers tons of money if they would just allow ereaders access to them. American comics are already on board and can't get enough of ereaders.

Same thing with streaming anime. I know there are various sites that have been streaming various shows for a while now, but are we really satisfied with them? What do we really want? I want to go to one site, be able to choose between subbed and dubbed, and watch my shows! I'm willing to pay, too! I wouldn't even mind if the site only allowed certain titles to be available for streaming for certain time periods like Netflix does for all of its streaming, just as long as they consider each series as a whole. None of this "episodes 5-12 now available" crap.

... We need a better way to access anime as a whole.

The risk is whether enough people are willing to pay. Crunchyroll kind of had to take the gamble, because they were not financially viable as a bootleg streaming host and so if the subscription model did not work, they were not really any worse off than where they started. But the other players have companies to lose if they gamble all their chips on a subscription model and for some reason it does not work out.

agila61 wrote:

The risk is whether enough people are willing to pay. Crunchyroll kind of had to take the gamble, because they were not financially viable as a bootleg streaming host and so if the subscription model did not work, they were not really any worse off than where they started. But the other players have companies to lose if they gamble all their chips on a subscription model and for some reason it does not work out.

That's ridiculous. The way of economics is the greater the risk the higher the return if sucessful.

Of course it could always fail but if the industry is really as bad off as they want everyone to believe then the worst case scenario is they'll die off, ...

... and considering that is likely to happen anyway if they do nothing then they really don't have anything to lose.

Honestly, the anime industry is full of excuses for reasons why they can't or won't make changes and they're incredibly pessimistic towards good ideas like subscription based networks.

I understand that the Japanese play a big part in what's wrong with this picture but the american companies don't do much to help either. Their only idea as of late is pushing people to keep buying and urging people to steal to buy something. If that's their sure fire plan than they might as well make a gamble and do something more in line with offering more subscription services.

Quote:

so far this year there are not much titles released that warrent me buying them - I look for interesting stories, art quality and rewatch value. FMA, Guin saga, Eden of the east movies, Highschool of the Dead, and the rest of Gundam 00 are so far the only titles i think i will be buying this year. sometimes it makes me wonder who choose the titles that are being released, every season there is usually 2 shows that are unique, yet are not picked for US distribution - with dubbing that is.

Wow. I agree completely with that sentiment. (Though not entirely with the shows you've listed) It's gotten to the point where I am faced with a conundrum: buy a crap/mediocre show just to support the excellent/good dub & the R1 company, or hold out for the elusive awesome show, and not support the R1 companies in the meantime.

To elaborate, I can't say I'm really interested in anything Sentai has lined up for the future, same with Funi. So, do I buy a mediocre show to support Funi & Sentai, or do I twiddle my thumbs while I wait for shows I want like Darker than Black:Ryuusei no Gemini or Golgo 13 III & IV, and hope that they don't die in the interim? Also, I know that the support of one average customer doesn't keep a company afloat, but if these companies tank during a period when I have foregone opportunity to support them, I'd feel horrible about it.
(Though MB is going to be getting a fair chunk of my change, so not all is lost.)

We have one subscription site with 20+ streams. Of the 13 simulcasts, all of the Americas, the UK and Ireland, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, Portugal and most of the Middle east have access to 10 or more of the streams. and except for France and some near neighbors, 6 or more streams are available everywhere outside of Asia.

We have one subscription site from the number three North American licensee offering a broad selection from their catalog with one simulcast a season, and the market leading licensee upgrading its site in preparation for launching a subscription service as we speak.

We have subscription services recently started in France, and launching this season in the UK/Ireland and in Australia/NZ.

It would be nonsense to characterize that as international licensees being "incredible pessimistic toward subscription sites".

If iTunes proves that people "want to pay for what they own", it also proves that people do not want to pay as much as record companies were able to get in the LP/CD eras ... music industry revenue from media is down, and where they have made it up is by increasing revenues from performances ~ rather than concerts being a tool to push records, today it is more commonplace that records are a tool to push concert attendance.

Part of that on the manga side comes from being a niche market ~ many of the ereaders do not support manga well, and most require labor intensive tuning of the digital files to get the best viewing experience on each device.

The out of print series are not likely to generate a ton of money, though they could generate some. In the current ebook market, which is just a relatively small fraction of the total book market, the discontinued series are unlikely to generate the majority of the costs that are common to print and ebook editions.

The risk is whether enough people are willing to pay. Crunchyroll kind of had to take the gamble, because they were not financially viable as a bootleg streaming host and so if the subscription model did not work, they were not really any worse off than where they started. But the other players have companies to lose if they gamble all their chips on a subscription model and for some reason it does not work out.

And if you are suggesting that the revenues that would be presently available for a dub anime subscription streaming site would be enough to cover the cost of a dub on its own ~ there's no evidence to suggest that it would be. It would, after all, only be a fraction of the revenue available from DVD sales, and for many series the prospective sales increase from including a dub are not sufficient to cover the cost of a dub.

Since it only works as a better way to access anime if it works in the real world, as opposed to working in our imagination, it will be a slower and more frustrating process than imagining how things might be done. "Japan", that is the older decision makers in the Japanese anime industry, do indeed seem to be more part of the problem than part of the solution, but that goes with the terrain for the international licensees.

the pessimistic notion comes more from the state of industry panel they did at otakon a year or two back and more aimed towards the American market and less so the international market.

ANN actually had the video up of it for a little while back when it happened. Anyway it was a pannel of fansubbers, and some people from funi and media blasters, and it was a rep from media blasters who actually led me to believe that a lot of people in the industry don't have much faith in the online stream market to help keep this boat afloat.

That's great that there are so many simulcasts and subscription based campaigns popping up and perhaps that rep from MB shares different views then the rest of the industry, but it's a little hard for me to believe that when a lot of them are quicker to point fingers at pirates and fans for not buying. Not that pirates shouldn't be held accountable, but it just seems like a lot more energy is being put into that instead of moving forward in making subscription streams more of a viable and profitable way forward as the dvd market grows bleak.

Most of our videos are Hulu embeds because it cuts bandwidth costs. More videos on Hulu means more anime for you.

Since ad revenue doesn't really cover all the bandwidth cost of hosting streaming video, Hulu enables us to actually make money on it. We get part of the ad revenue from Hulu as well as the ad revenue from the ad on the video player page.

Not everything is hosted on Hulu. Those videos that aren't on Hulu (trailers, clips, and some of the episodes) are on the FUNimation video player.

If you live in Canada, you get to use the FUNimation video player all the time since Hulu is only available in the U.S.

[The out of print series are not likely to generate a ton of money, though they could generate some. In the current ebook market, which is just a relatively small fraction of the total book market, the discontinued series are unlikely to generate the majority of the costs that are common to print and ebook editions.

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