Forum - View topicNEWS: ADV Files 3rd-Party Claim in Funimation's Lawsuit
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Surrender Artist
 Posts: 3264 Location: Pennsylvania, USA |
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Well Hell, why not just get rid of the whole lot and replace them with a single national, government monopoly on anime licensing and distribution? We can call it Federal Animation Importers Limited and have Stu Levy run it.
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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A very unconvincing opinion. The media market gets worse, not better, when there are fewer competing entities. This isn't "natural" monopoly territory, like, say, the electric company. |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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As a dub fan, for me, FUNi already is a monopoly. Competition is always good for any market, but in this race FUNI beats the rest and they get my money for it as a reward.
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Banden
 Posts: 140 |
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USPS has raised their prices at least 7 times in the last 10 years on first class & postcard mail. Here's a handy table of the price history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_postage_rates A cent or two a year may seem negligible, but at volumes of 554 million letters and postcards a day it adds up to billions and trillions of dollars in just a few years' time. Priority and Express mail have also come up in price proportionally, not to mention parcel carrying. USPS does have competition on packages from FedEx/DHL/UPS/etc, which Wikipedia attributes to monopolistic price gouging in USPS's early days, but constitutionally USPS still holds a legal monopoly on non-express mail delivery and mail box access. |
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Mesonoxian Eve
Posts: 1858 |
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I don't agree with this because examples of these "facts" always prop up the same companies, including those over a century ago. The fact remains there are companies running as a monopoly and do so because they're not interfering with competition. It's a misconception to believe "monopoly" means "sole business". A monopoly is an entity which controls/operates in a majority capacity. In short: FUNimation is a monopoly, because by its own admission, it's in the position to pick and choose titles it wants to license, leaving everything it turns down to the "competition".
You're right, because 100% isn't accurate. However, the company is still a monopoly by definition. Proving not all monopolies follow this apparent "economic fact". Our food industry: monopolized. Our pet food industry: monopolized. Our drug pharmacies: monopolized. Our entertainment industry: monopolized. Okay, this one does follow fact. 
You do realize he's referring to the United States Postal System, right? Because it's not a business in the typical sense we define them. It's more accurate to classify them as a not-for-profit organization, meaning they can't make a profit by law. The issues with the USPS isn't how the business is run, but its tight regulations incapable of accounting for the increased costs surrounding it, most notably fuel charges. |
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punipuniwarrior
Posts: 41 |
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Jesus, all this talk of people wanting a monopoly. No thank you. I'd stop buying altogether if that was the case.
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fuuma_monou
Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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Thanks for the links. I was going on anecdotes that U.S. postal rates were low compared to other first world countries', and reports that future retirement benefits were being paid for now, which is causing cash flow problems. |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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Xanas
Posts: 2058 |
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You remind me that I miss Skip Oliva's articles. The FTC is truly vile. |
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superdry
 Posts: 1309 |
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Besides the union, one of the biggest hurdles for the USPS is the mandate from Congress to pre-fund future retiree healthcare benefits. That's a huge chunk of money to put towards that fund every year ($5 billion or so?) and if the USPS can either stop that or lower what it puts it, it'll help them. I guess that's counts towards labor costs, but a fixed labor cost that they seem to can't do much about. |
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linkismyhero
Posts: 4 |
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Are you reading this, pro-monopoly people? As I said in my last post:
As the kids say, "Called it, suckas." |
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jsieczkar
Posts: 139 |
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It is not just the pre-funding it is the length of time of the pre-funding, they are making payments for people who are not yet working for the postal service. No company even remotely does this congress raised the requirement across the board for government employees for two reasons; it raises operating costs and it gives a bigger amount of money for them to raid to fund things. The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) has agreed on every change the Post Master wanted including pay freezes, congress then refused all of the changes. The biggest obstacle in making the Post Office viable is not Unions but AARP members and congress. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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First of all, when Funimation was in fact the only R1 company doing any licensing and creating any dubs, we had far fewer choices than we do now. ADV was dying slowly, surviving only on re-re-releases of old titles. Nozomi was only licensing niche shows and releasing them subonly. NISA didn't exist yet. Aniplex of America didn't exist yet. Geneon USA was gone. Media Blaster did a very small amount of releases and only dubbed a select number of them. Bandai's licensing had also slowed to a crawl and the quality of their products was sporadic at best.
Even then, despite a "monopoly" and their claim that they had first dibs at everything in Japan, Funimation was only licensing a select number of shows and outright said they wouldnt license certain properties. Some of the series they licensed took several years to come to market, and sometimes had dubious quality when they did. Since Sentai, NISA, and Aniplex have started releasing titles, especially since Sentai started dubbing and acquiring bigger series like HoTD, Funimation has been acquiring more series and taking risks on more niche series after seeing the success of similar titles at other companies. More titles are being licensed and released, including extremely niche titles that Funimation wouldn't even consider touching and that companies like Nozomi and Bandai wouldn't even release. Art boxes are back. Premium releases are back. The subtitle quality on their releases has improved. Funimation has also finally started to release more new titles way month and is cutting the time from license announcement to street date. When Funimation had a monopoly, their business practices and products were considerably worse than they are now. Since they've had competition, they've had reason to improve their releases. In this cases, competition improved the market for everyone. If you like Funi's releases, you are getting more of them the last several months and you are getting things like physical extras and art boxes if you want them. If you like more niche releases that Funi doesn't want, then you are also in a good spot here, because you have Nozomi, Sentai, MB, etc. If you like Houston and LA dubs, you are still getting some of those as well. I don't see how you can claim that the days of Funi only putting out one or two new titles, and everybody else only releasing catalog titles was a much better market. As I said, there are plenty of us that we're very unhappy then because Funimation wasnt licensing anything we were interested in. Just because you like their products doesn't mean that everyone does. You might as well make the claim that Apple having the entire cell phone market would be good, since you're comparing them to a sunglasses company. We have history and knowledge on our side that shows what Funimation did when they had nearly all of the R1 market to themselves (other than a few titles hat Viz had and very niche titles from other companies.). It may have been good for you, but it wasn't good for everyone. You only have belief and hope on your side that Funi would distribute and dub everything if they were the only R1 company around. You have nothing to back up your claims. Also, you've failed to provide any proof that Funi has first shot at everything that comes out of Japan. Gen Fukunaga and his team can claim anything they want. That doesn't make it true without proof. You also fail to acknowledge that those comments were made several years ago now and market conditions seem to indicate that they are no longer true, and may have never been in fact correct. A claim means nothing without proof. |
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Mesonoxian Eve
Posts: 1858 |
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I'm sorry, dragonrider_cody and others, but I can see I'm wasting my breath here. One: monopolies are illegal, so no matter what I believe, it's pointless. Two: I see nothing but excuses by people who are purposely keeping a closed mind under some misguided belief the industry will suffer.
I'm retracting my monopoly statement. Instead, I'm going to point to Funico, where two companies merged together to form one. That's where I was going with a monopoly, and I apologize for the confusion. I'm bailing because I find the whole "People will leave and poor quality offerings is why competition is needed" excuses intolerable, especially when some of you simply seem to be ignoring the issues of the current R1 market, not what happened 10 years ago. That era was an entirely different anime market than what's around today. For starters: R1 was bidding against each other, which helped inflate licenses to nearly $1 million for titles we look at now and say "What the hell?" Make excuses all you want, but don't come running to me when two of the largest R1 companies whine they don't have any money to license titles because they've spent it all on these stupid lawsuits. There's something wrong here, but at least that's something we can all agree on. As a parting gift... *hands out chocolate covered ants. Hush up and try them. They're good. You barely taste ant. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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This false comment shows you either don't know anything about business, or are just lying. Please show me your prof that Funimation and NicoNico merged into one company. Two companies forming a coventure doesn't equate a merger. NicoNico and Funimation are two legally distinct entities. They do not exist of operate under one corporate banner. If they did, NicoNico and Funico would be involved in this lawsuit, but they are mentioned nowhere. In laments terms, Funimation and NicoNico aren't the same company. Also, there is a mighty big difference between the market today and in 2002-2005. No one is paying a million dollars a title because they don't want to. It's because they can't afford to. Even when there are bidding wars these days, the prices still stay sane. That's not likely to change just because we have NISA and AoA in the picture. If prices get to high on a license these days, it just doesn't come out or Funimation, Sentai, etc wait for the prices to come down. Also, no one has been swayed by your point because you have repeatedly failed to make one. If you are making the argument that a monopoly is the best for North America, that is your opinion. However, you haven't presented any proof to back you up. Not to mention, one could counter argue that in that case that any company having a monopoly would be better. Wouldn't a Viz or Sentai monopoly be just as beneficial with your thinking? |
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