Forum - View topicANNCast - Vowlesemort Lives!
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2230 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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Simply put: The system as it stands gives almost all the cards to the publishers and the terms that are in place give far too little money as a percentage to the artists (in the majority of cases) in my opinion. The concept of shared rights itself isn't unfair, it's the implementation of it as it stands today. |
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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That's largely centered in the economics of the printing press. But on the other hand, compare 10% of a $4 serial with 80% of $0.005 in online advertising revenue ... that's $0.40 versus $0.004. You need 100 times the readers in the second just to catch up. If its a subscription model, it would be possible for that to swing the opposite direction - a $5 online subscription with 80% going to the artist/author would be $4 per subscriber, or 1/10th as many subscribers to get the same rights income as the miserable page rates paid by the serials .... and of course, with the opportunity to get additional royalty income on wider release. |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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I wonder what the magic number would be for sub-only US releases sold Video-on-Demand that had the bulk of their subtitling work done for a previous streaming release? 50, maybe? 100? It could conceivably be in a range where just getting public libraries that lend anime DVD's to buy would cover the overheads and all sales to the general would be gravy. |
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
 Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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Minimum print run, depending on the replication plant, is 500 or 1000, and that's typically priced at $1 per unit. If you don't have the equipment, you have to pay for video capture off the masters. There's design and authoring, which can be done in house if you have people that know how. And marketing, if you're smart and want to actually sell the product. (I'm seeing several small sub-only releases fall on their faces right now because there's just no marketing, so people don't even realize they exist.) But really, the biggest expense in a sub-only release is the license fee, so that's really the big variable that makes it impossible to generalize an overall breakeven for this kind of release. It was the license fees that made the breakevens for some of the Geneon stuff north of 10,000 units, but if the fee is low enough it could be as little as 1,000. But we can only guess at what's what -- the fees are contractually confidential and are seldom talked about. Selling 50 or 100 units is so little that it's considered not worth the time of someone paid on salary to even put the disc together. |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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Did I write Video-on-Demand? I'm going to blame the blood pressure. The minimum print run for DVD-On-Demand is 1. After all, just like Print-on-Demand, generating the disk is part of order fulfillment. It does, of course, cost substantially more than $1/disk, for the first disk in a box at least.
That's the magic number question. What unit sales to cover the salary cost of the design and authoring of a DVD, in terms of units sold.
The pre-requisite to a DVD-on-demand distribution is fixed per sale or gross revenue royalties, so it requires either a royalty-only license or having a different channel fund for the up-front component in a package license. |
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Charred Knight
 Posts: 3085 |
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Did Geneon have like a beer fountain to explain those liscensing cost? When I heard that no Gonzo show had hit 10,000 between Vandread and Strike Witches I had assumed that was the break even. I thought that Geneon was just foolish with those liscensing cost, but now I have to say that Geneon was simply insane. 10,000 break even for Cybusters, a franchise that not only had never been released in America and wouldn't see another release until 2006, but a series which just had the Cybuster mecha and Granzon mecha since I am pretty sure the Valsione wasn't in the Cybuster anime. |
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hissatsu01
 Posts: 963 Location: NYC |
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Probably stronger stuff than beer.
10,000 per volume would be considered a modest hit. If 10,000 was the break even, I think the entire industry in Japan would have collapsed entirely years ago.
Very much so.
I'm sure Justin can explain all the gory details, but I believe the short version of DVD on demand is that is isn't worth doing at all, at least not for anime. Last edited by hissatsu01 on Tue Jun 22, 2010 7:56 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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kabiigon
 Posts: 9 |
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My take on streaming: I appreciate that streaming is a big step forward, but for me there are far too many unknowns when I'm used to my current system of watching fansubs and buying the discs when they come out.
Example: What series are available? What sites do I have to visit for what series? What episodes of that series are available? Will these episodes expire and when? Are those episodes subbed or dubbed? If subbed, what is the translation quality? If dubbed, what is the translation/voice acting etc.? What is the video quality? What is the connection quality? (e.g. bandwidth/stuttering) When are those episodes released? How does this change based on your user level? Are those series/episodes region locked? If episodes aren't region locked, could this be reversed in future? What do I have to pay to watch each episode? / Do I need to pay for a subscription? Should I have to pay "twice" when I may well end up buying the discs if/when they come out? How do I keep track of all of this information? To me, this seems like a lot of uncertainty when I'll end up purchasing series I want regardless of whether I've seen a legitimate stream or not. Admittedly a few of those points could rightly be considered a bit lazy just because I'm used to using the old methods, but I don't see any big issues if I'm paying for stuff in the end. To be fair, region locking turned me off streaming even though there's at least one source I know can't block me which didn't exist when legitimate streaming was just starting up. I follow both local (Australian) releases and also import from the US quite a bit. To me, importing is a pretty easy option (you don't have to leave your computer chair!) and shouldn't be used as an excuse not to purchase something when it's available in your language and you don't have to pay exorbitant shipping/conversion costs. Finally, from way-left field: what would be the ethics be if you bought a movie ticket for a movie you couldn't attend and then proceeded to watch a downloaded copy, if that particular cinema session was sold out and someone was deprived of going to see it in person? 
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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Your business numbers fetish here is getting a little out of hand, and I'm not interested in turning this forum into an Excel worksheet for an imaginary and hypothetical business, so let me just say this: No. No no no no no. I will never attempt DVD on Demand ever again, it was a complete cluster-f#ck for everyone involved. The per-unit costs spiked to over $3 per unit, which means that if you sold more than 150 units you spent more than if you just replicated 500 and sat on the rest. The logistics were a nightmare, people wouldn't buy direct from the manufacturer, which meant we had to go through Right Stuf, whcih meant another 50% off the top of an already low price. The paltry few dollars that were left was never even paid to ImaginAsian before TitleMatch went out of business. And on top of that, you couldn't even do dual-layer discs. So, no, DVD On Demand is not worth pursuing. If you can't sell 500 units, you should not make the disc. Period. Even if the license is free. |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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In all the questions, that's the linchpin. All of this is information that different people have to find out largely individually, normally organized in a different way for each site. It would be so much more efficient if there was a common place to pool this kind of information, where you could click an a "Hulu/anime" link and get a list of all the anime streaming on Hulu, or "YouTube" and all the licensed channels streaming anime on YouTube, etc. It might even allow the list to be filtered to just streams available to a given country. The series listed could actually be links to pages that collect information about each anime, even links to reviews of the streams if its been reviewed (to answer the quality of sub/dub etc. questions), which streams go to which regions, if there is a simulcast or "quickcast", if there is a deadline, etc. It could even link directly to the page at Hulu or YouTube or Crunchyroll.com or Funimation.com or AnimeNewsNetwork.com where the stream can be found. Such a site could even have a "MyStreams" section where the equivalent of the Hulu queue or the Crunchyroll Watchlist or YouTube's subscriptions can be set up, showing when new episodes of streams you are following have become available, without having to keep track of the idiosyncracies of each system. Oh, my, such a system would be handy. If only there was a natural site for such a system to find a home ... |
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Graddick
 Posts: 46 |
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A reasonable discussion of piracy? on ANNcast? from Zac?
Well I never I make no bones about my meager expenditures on anime DVDs. It's been at least a year and a half since my last purchase and I can't see myself buying more DVDs any time soon. It would probably be one of the newer Gundam releases, but Bandai still needs to exorcize the demon of Bandai Visual from its system before I resume my purchasing. But I digress... I would characterize myself as being similar to Zac's situation before the collector's instinct took hold. I could go out and buy something right now, but inertia (read:cheapness) keeps me from doing it. I just can't be bothered and guilt trips delivered via internet (or podcast) are remarkably ineffective. Furthermore, as I get older, I find less and less of a desire to own things (conversion to Buddhism imminent?) and I'd rather not be burdened by the tons of possessions such as what Justin described last episode. Regarding the awakening of the collector's instinct, I have a weakness for needing complete sets of things. Give me #1, 2 and 4 and I will move mountains to get #3. This is likely why I find it hard to purchase manga outside of omnibus editions. I have no faith that it will be completed and once it is, the first volumes are nigh impossible to find. I've had to be careful to keep myself from falling back into the clutches of my inner collector. Half of my dresser drawers are filled with Gundam action figures I bought back when they were still in stores. Now I'm shelling out real money to get the rarest of them off ebay. But hey, buying Gundam action figures apparently isn't the right kind of purchasing so this post will surely get another ANN fatwah put on my head from some of the more rabid forum members. Those who say that under no circumstances can downloading be acceptable, let along justified are akin to the "fudge you I deserve anything I want imma pirate arrgh" folks. Both are useless ideologues. Yes, content creators need to be compensated in some way. No, learning Japanese is not a reasonable expectation of fans. However, I still take a certain perverse pleasure at imagining the reaction of ANN's die hard anti-piracy crusaders to Zac and Justin's admittance that yeah, sometimes piracy can still play a certain role in anime fandom. |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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No harm, no foul is an ideology too. Starting from different value systems implies arriving at different value judgements. On the anime side, merchandisers are in the production committee putting money into the pot to raise the budget, so even if its not a direct royalty payment, when they make their money back on their past merch rights, that makes it easier for them to justify putting money into new productions for new merch rights. Downloading is, in any event, far less damaging than leech streaming and manga viewing sites. Worrying about minority downloaded rather than the majority viewing on leech streaming and manga viewing sites is like putting a bandage on a cut when a person also has a broken leg that needs splinting. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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To clarify, do you say this in virtue of the unhelpful advertising revenue gained by the latter? From your post, you appear to have in mind the simple fact that streaming is more popular than downloading, and is thereby responsible for a greater proportion of anime piracy. Whilst this may be true, it attributes the difference in each method's propensity to damage to a mere matter of how the fans happen to obtain anime illegally, and not to any facts intrinsic to the manners of illegal acquisition in question. Thus, I can grant that downloading happens to be far less damaging than streaming, but not necessarily "in any event". |
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Annf
Posts: 578 |
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This is a bad situation that North American publishers have created for themselves. They've trained their customers to not trust them to release later volumes, which encourages waiting until everything is out. And we're talking about a group of customers who are already very accustomed to waiting, so waiting some more is not hard for them. But if N.A. publishers are on shoe-string budgets and barely breaking even as it is, investing in completing failing series at a loss for the sake of future good will may be impossible. Will we be seeing a move to "box sets" for manga, too? |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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There is also the fact that streaming generates revenues that are driven in part on number of episodes viewed, so when streaming is tolerated, those bootleg streaming sites that adopt practices that are the most successful at generating ad revenues will be selected for. So they grow toward malignant effects on the market. |
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