Forum - View topicAnswerman - Are Physical Anime Releases In Danger?
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AnimeLordLuis
 Posts: 1626 Location: The Borderlands of Pandora |
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Yeah physical Anime releases are not going anywhere anytime soon there are too many collectors like me who prefer to own their favorite series on DVD and Blu-Ray it's why Aniplex of America hasn't gone out of business. Also regarding Amazon exclusives I believe that Amazon will let Funimation handle the Dub and home video release of their shows why because of Funimation's Amazon Exclusives plus it would be cheaper than paying a Hollywood based dub company and then spending more money for a physical release when they could form a partnership with Funimation of course I could be wrong.
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5396 |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6879 Location: Kazune City |
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And that's one thing a lot of the pricing comparisons are leaving out -- a dual-language DVD that sold at somewhere around the same price as a single-language VHS already represented a ~50% reduction in price, since it meant getting two audio tracks for the prior price of one. The other factor being overlooked is inflation. While it's not as stark as comparing pre-1970s prices to today, $40 in 1993 is $65.92 in 2016 dollars. If you combine inflation adjustments and the two-for-one aspect of DVD/Blu-Ray vs VHS, you get an 80-90% price decline in anime over the past 20-25 years. At least for typical Sentai/Funimation type prices; although even the Aniplex/Pony Canyon models still don't exceed the prices of yesteryear. |
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Just Passing Through
Posts: 277 |
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If I can't hold something in my hands, I don't consider that I own it. So I'll always want VHS, LD, DVD, BD, or UHD BD or whatever storage technology is in the mainstream, Vinyl, Cassette, CD, and hardback and paperback. If it's on a server elsewhere, where someone else has control over the content, and can switch it off at anytime, it's a rental. If I have a copy on a hard drive that can potentially crash, then it's a long term rental (especially when there's DRM that stops back-ups).
I can understand streaming diminishing the hard copy market (though I wonder if The Force Awakens will beat Titanic and Avatar for sales this week). After all, a video rental shop offered a choice of thousands of movies, DVD rental maybe ten times as many, or a hundred times as many when it came to postal services. But renting via Netflix and similar services could offer the choice of millions of titles with no hard copy overhead. You may no longer need to seek out that 50s b-movie The Brain Eaters starring Leonard Nimoy on hard to find DVD, as no one will rent it. But again the services are ephemeral. I do think that streaming will kill traditional broadcast TV as we know it. Right now, I have a Smart TV, hooked up to an ADSL broadband service. I can get around 200 channels through a satellite receiver, 100 channels through a terrestrial aerial, and around 50 IP channels. The terrestrial transmitter broadcasts an MHEG slate for them, so they appear on the terrestrial EPG.Flicking through the channels is an almost seamless affair, the only difference being AV quality and the few seconds an IP channel needs to buffer. Otherwise they're just like normal TV. In 20-30 years, when 99% of homes are hooked up to gigabit fibre, there will be a lot fewer aerials on rooftops, a lot fewer satellite dishes pointed at the sky, and the linear broadcast channels will be wholly integrated with on demand streaming and rental channels, all piped through the Internet. And people will still be collecting their favourite movies and TV shows on whatever permanent storage medium will be in vogue. |
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Ali07
 Posts: 3333 Location: Victoria, Australia |
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I do wonder, over time, what will happen with streaming. As it is, I'd need 4-5 different subscriptions if I'm to watch everything I want to check out (I'm extending this to shows other than anime). Only non-anime streaming subscription I have is Netflix. And, after being nagged by a friend to watch Harry Potter, I decided to have a look and see if they had it...and they do...but it's only movies 3-5, and I'd have to get another subscription service if I wanted to watch 1-2/6-8. 
On physical media, I don't think I'd ever end up not buying a show/movie I love on disc. Disc is the way I prefer to rewatch something. Easier to pop in a disk than hope that my Wi-Fi doesn't decide to stuff up during a viewing. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Huh. So even then, during the days of the most intense subs versus dubs disputes and when there WERE a lot of genuinely bad dubs, dubs were still more popular?
I think there will be a demand for broadcast/cable/satellite TV for a while, even if it will likely become niche. People use streaming services for TV to watch shows they're already familiar with or heard about from other people. But what about the people who discover these shows? Nine times out of ten, they're watching it on their TVs. TV streaming is a very different process than normal TV. It is a lot more deliberate. There's also live sports coverage, which currently cannot be beaten by streaming as far as quality and time delay goes. You're going to have to pry broadcast sports from every sports bar owner's cold dead hands. Finally, there are areas where Internet quality is not very high or nonexistent. I live in the United States, but I live in one such area: It's a remote mountainous and low-income region where ground lines are hard to install and the mountains block high-speed satellite signals. Verizon has installed fiber optic lines, but the switch over to Frontier Communications has been extremely rough, with our Internet speeds having been throttled as of late and some cities, like Redondo Beach, CA, completely without Internet for several days. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Change yer diapers, junior--I remember when you got TWO episodes on VHS tape for $30! (This is just going to turn into a 90's-anime version of the Pythons' Four Yorkshiremen sketch, I know it.. )
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4470 |
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The thing that actually got me to start collecting back in the 3/4 episode single disc days was that even as a fledgling viewer, it was pretty obvious that I needed to actually buy a copy if I wanted to make sure I could revisit a show. I started the summer before starting high school, and by the time I was going to college, the TV networks that aired anime were already licensing fewer shows and dedicating less time to anime. I was still dependent on TV to try out new shows, but it was obvious that I couldn't count on them being available later.
Acquiring things digitally, like Justin said, leaves you largely at the mercy of the service provider. Not too long ago, I bought a PC game digitally because it was far cheaper than any out-of-print copy. The download service was sold to another company, which was fine because the sales records went along, too. When I later went to put the game on a new PC I couldn't simply copy it. When I went to re-download it, the original seller had repurchased the service, but my records didn't make it back this time, so I was cut off from using something that I had paid for, and had to buy it again if I wanted it. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Excuse me if this answer sounds coarse, but...(plffft! drink-spray) In what universe?? The old 2010 mantra of "I don't need my disks anymore, they're all streaming on Netflix!" is a little different today, and catching those smug hopefuls who used to say it with their pants down: Now that studios have their own money invested in VOD streaming--like Warner with Flixster and Disney with DisneyMoviesAnywhere--they're starting to wonder why they should cut into their own business by lending movies for people to watch for free by paying only once a month. Amazon Prime has already become a ghost town, with only a few Sony 80's movies surfacing every few months or so, Sony's ad-supported Crackle has been a zombie for six years, and it's only Netflix's exclusive deal with Disney and Dreamworks that has kept them from drowning in the same morass-pit of micro-horror, indie navel-gazing, food/legalization activist documentaries and "original programming" that has started to take over subscription services just because it was cheap enough to fill the void. Disk collectors, back when they were VHS tape collectors, felt they were "preserving" their movies and shows in one place before unpredictable TV airing took them away again. That is EXACTLY what physical Blu collectors feel is happening now, because studios are taking them away. Better start embracing that disk-collector culture now, because if studios have their way--and Warner wants their way and will do anything to get it--you won't get your movies anywhere else, especially not on TV.
Your Netflix has actual mainstream big-studio Harry Potter sequels?? 
Lucky bumsters--Either Warner Australia hasn't caught up with their parent-company's paranoia yet, or they figure it's just Australia. (And just what took you so long, anyway?  Don't tell me you were punishing the series for its fans.)
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1116 Location: Puget Sound |
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Excuse me if this answer sounds coarse, but...(plffft! drink-spray) In what universe?? I can't speak to Crackle, but at least in America neither Amazon or Netflix are as you describe them. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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The following post contains strong accents. Reader discretion is advised. "When aah wuh' lad, we coun't afford 'latest anime vid'yus — y' goh' onlih' two episodes f' more th'n tenner back then. Mah mate Sutcliffe said ih' paid twen'ih f' Evangeliunn, and e' coun't uhnderstand a word theh' sayin'! Theh' want even speakin' English! So ih' took it back t'shop an' swapped it fr' twen'ih cigs an' pack uh' Quavers." English transcripts are available upon request. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Oh, I'm sorry--You're able to watch Annie, Zathura, and a full selection of Comedy Central/MTV series on Prime, along with the Emmy-winning Transparent?
(Or at least, one season of them, before they make you buy $19 season passes for the others.) Again, like Netflix, it's only carefully cultivated loyalties with the studios that will keep them from being made "expendable", and having to fill out their programming dredging up indie-journeyman airings of "Food, Inc." Even HuluPlus, who sells their current and classic TV collection as their main draw, would have an equally empty indie/public-domain-cheapie Movie selection if it weren't for their exclusive deal with the Criterion catalog. Used to be Criterion was the only reason for getting a month of HuluPlus, but their TV's been getting better.
The VHS tapes were easier to buy, which made them more popular--MediaPlay and the record stores could stock Viz's Ranma dubs to hook the "hip manga" crowd, but the subtitled version had the stigma of being a "foreign" niche item. So Viz only (grudgingly) created the Ranma subs as a "collector's item", meaning you had to find it on Amazon or niche comic-book stores, and the tiny comic stores would have to sell it for $39. Even regular Viz or Pioneer series that had dual VHS editions, it took a lot more searching to find the Sub than the Dub. (Used to snap up the rare Subbed copies of Disney's Kiki tape if I found it at Suncoast, just because you could sell them for three times the price on eBay.)
Netflix operates on a lower bandwidth than "HD and now UHD quality movies, streaming directly from your VOD provider!", whose download rates require the same obscene and expensive high-speed connection your cable provider is only too happy to sell you. I only have an "economy" 3-5mbPS rate that's good enough for YouTube, and on my PS3, it's good enough to stream Amazon or Netflix at a 720p HD rate. That's because the subscription services have no pretensions other than being the Replacement For TV...Unlike the progressively greedier studios that want streaming to completely replace their hi-def disks and have to deliver the quality to match it. As for Streaming Vs. TV, it was the freedom of selecting and bathroom-interrupting your viewing time, which pretty well made broadcast TV obsolete. (Even if created a generation now abusing their privilege of "Binge-watching", just because it's "all there in front of you".) Even on the Internet-streaming PlutoTV, which still involves scheduled broadcast, I still never quite manage to tune into the beginning of a show.
That's part of the misinterpretation the industry is making about Streaming vs. TV/Cable, or Streaming vs. Disk Rental: If we want to watch something ONCE, streaming is more disposable, gives us the selection option, and leaves nothing to clean up...But only under those conditions we used to watch regular TV/Blockbuster-rental, in that we weren't picky what we wanted to watch. That's the mentality that goes into Tuesday-night channel-clicking, but not the mentality that goes into a carefully preserved favorite. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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That's the UK version--In the US, we have Dana Carvey's old 80's-SNL "Grumpy Old Man" sketches ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbU4Cb4A4-o ): "Eh, you kids whining about your series boxsets...Why, in my day, the tapes were only ten minutes long! And it didn't matter if it was in the middle of an episode, that was it, and you had to buy another tape for $50, just to find out what happened after the commercial! And we didn't have this 'online Amazon ordering' either, you had to go search out some comic book store--And it was in some back alley in the dark side of town, full of drunks and muggers, and if you only had $49, the store owner had some big guy named Vinny take you out back and beat it out of you, and leave you right there in the sewer! And we liked it, because that's how we got our tapes! And we didn't have dual-audio DVD either, we had the big Dub vs. Sub wars, and turning brother against brother, and your father teaching you how to use a rifle, and learning twelve ways to kill a man....Just 'cause, meh-meh-meh, some fans didn't want to go to the back-alley comic store like a real fan, and be beaten up by Vinny for their ten-minute $50 VHS tape!" |
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sunflower
 Posts: 1080 |
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Blech. I grew up with records that skipped and jumped so you'd have to tape a quarter to the arm, with cassette tapes of so many formats we had about 8 different devices in the house to play them, if we were lucky enough that it didn't eat them and stretch them out or just plain wear them out (Oh Little GTO, how my brother loved you). We were constantly cleaning needles and rollers with alcohol on swabs to get the da#*ed things to work. VHS tapes were just as bad, terrible quality that degraded in under a decade. CDs and DVDs have a better shelf life, but not by much. And don't use a Seagate HD or you have a one in three chance if losing everything on it within a couple of years.
I'm tired of collecting physical media and seeing it lost to time and chance and new formats. I want to pay a company to be stewards of the shows and songs I watch and listen to. $60 buys a new show, huh? It buys a year's worth of Crunchyroll, with access to all of their shows, none of the hassle of waiting for releases, storing the stuff, finding something to play it. I get that shows on physical media are collectors items for some anime hobbiests. But don't try to convince me it's better. Maybe for you, but for me it's just a pain. Been there, done that. (Now get off my lawn!)
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toyNN
 Posts: 252 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I really haven't added much to my decent sized DVD/BD library of anime in the past few years. Evangelion 3.33 (finally) was the only title purchased in the past year. Don't know if its all that streaming has replaced the need to purchase many of the titles or none of the shows have the appeal. Wonder what shows everyone else is getting?
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