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Zac wrote:

Lemme ask you, Daizo - who I remember from the Oreimo thing - for all your hyperventilating and shitting on my head about getting my facts wrong, how much actual daylight is there between the scenario I incorrectly described and what actually happened?

Quite a lot - the scenario you described was for all practical purposes impossible.

Zac wrote:

Does the fact that the show wasn't subbed inside the hour between broadcast and simulcast somehow change the fact that it was still - like every other series - instantaneously ripped off and spread across the globe by speedsubbers?

You keep using the word "speedsubbers", but I don't think that's the word you should be using. It was pretty much instantly ripped by dedicated direct ripper(s) like HorribleSubs. Since their operation is completely automated, it can be done so fast, and it's also why it doesn't really have anything to do with actual fansubbing or speedsubbing for that matter. The actual subbers took 10 to 12 hours to get it out, which is far from what I'd call "instantaneous".

Zac wrote:

Does it change the fact that the same 4 or 5 groups of people eagerly fansubbed the series as soon as it was available even though there's a free, legal version of it streaming not only in America but in France and other regions?

"Other regions"? What other regions? And even if there are any other regions where it was simulcasted, I'm not in any of them. Neither is the large majority of the international anime fanbase.

Zac wrote:

You claim that the incorrect scenario I had was viciously concocted to make fansubbers look "bad" and "evil" and "immature", but are you saying the actual reality of what happened and what happens to every single show coming out of Japan is somehow noble and right and true and simply misunderstood by the people who's livelihood is affected by it?

I'm just rather annoyed that you guys seem to be completely out of touch with reality when it comes to anything related to fansubbing or illegal anime distribution in general. The fact that you guys seriously though that a fansub group, even a speedsub one, could possibly manage to get a release out within an hour of the broadcast and didn't doubt this for a moment clearly shows this. And honestly speaking, I'm baffled about this. When you're into anime, and anime news reporting on top of that, I'd think that you guys would keep tabs on what's going on in the "other side" as well, especially since the illegal and legal still go quite largely hand-to-hand in this niche.

Last edited by jsevakis on Sat Jan 22, 2011 7:21 pm; edited 1 time in total

Daizo wrote:

The fact that HorribleSubs released it shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone, though - they've been ripping CR, FUNi and TAN simulcasts for ages.

Nobody mentioned anything about surprise. We weren't, and I doubt anyone at Funi was either. Maybe the FPC was, but as we discussed, they don't appear to understand how the internet works. I also highly doubt HorribleSubs is just a bot. Surely they've set up a procedure to make it easier for themselves, but since they only post the simulcasts, someone is clearly controlling something.

I admit I was relying on Zac for the play-by-play of this particular incident, but I know how to fansub like the back of my hand, since I use the same tools for pro work. You can totally make a crap quality fansub in an hour if you type the translation into Aegisub directly while it airs, then time while you encode. I wouldn't want to watch the result, but I've seen stuff that looked that bad.

It seems like you're more upset about us lumping in HorribleSubs with other fansubbers, and soiling their name somehow. But as actual fansubs were out not long after, the only thing different is how much work they put into their piracy, as if that somehow invalidates the piracy being committed.

adam_omega wrote:

Borders carries a higher volume of manga and a wider selection than Barnes & Noble, in a lot of cases. So not only would it impact both the bottom line of manga publishers, but it would also affect the types of books they publish as a whole. It would indeed be the manga apocalypse. Dun dun duuuuun.

I dunno... the Internet retailer segment is quite well-established; the demise of Borders is likely to lead to a shift in manga purchasing habits, rather than customers giving up manga entirely.

It may take a few months for consumer behaviour to adapt, but that's the only issue I can think of.

Daizo wrote:

I'm just rather annoyed that you guys seem to be completely out of touch with reality when it comes to anything related to fansubbing or illegal anime distribution in general. The fact that you guys seriously though that a fansub group, even a speedsub one, could possibly manage to get a release out within an hour of the broadcast and didn't doubt this for a moment clearly shows this. And honestly speaking, I'm baffled about this. When you're into anime, and anime news reporting on top of that, I'd think that you guys would keep tabs on what's going on in the "other side" as well, especially since the illegal and legal still go quite largely hand-to-hand in this niche.

I'll give you that, absolutely. I should've done some more research and had my facts 100 percent straight before commenting on any technical issue regarding fansubs. I'll be more careful in the future.

However, you keep saying "you guys" and "news reporting", which tells me you are just as ignorant about my job, this organization, who works here and what their responsibilities are as you claim I am about the details of fansubbing.

My work is editorial, which means my trade is entirely opinion, interviews, reviews, columns. I'm not a news reporter - Egan Loo is our news editor and Gia Manry is our associate news editor. Neither of them made a mistake here. There was no erroneous information in the news feed, which is so distinct on the front page as to be completely separated from the opinion feed, which is that blue box on the right side. That blue box is what I'm responsible for.

What you're doing is saying how "baffled" you are at Newsweek because Howard Fineman got a fact wrong in an op/ed in the opinion section. (Note - I am not comparing myself to Howard Fineman, this is just an analogy to help you understand). Now, absolutely Howard Fineman should correct his mistake and apologize for it; as someone who is trusted with the opinion section of the magazine, he's responsible for getting his facts straight, but Newsweek's news team didn't make the mistake.

To end the belabored analogy, I apologized for my mistake and corrected it in the article, which is what I should always do in my regular line of work and always have done.

~fin~

Zac wrote:

You'd have an argument here if Horriblesubs' rips were the only illegal subtitled versions of the shows being distributed. If fansub groups on the whole - even a majority of them - sincerely only stuck to shows that were unlicensed, and not a single fansub group had a version of Fractale out there, you might have a point.

Again, the international anime fanbase is very large. A show being licensed in America or France is hardly "licensed" for the whole international audience. English subtitles reach the largest international audience due to English being pretty much a lingua franca on the internet, thus English fansubs are the most likely to get made. And within the fansubbers that produce English fansubs, a very large amount of people don't live in the US or speak English as their first language, so it's not even a given that the fansubbers themselves could watch the show(s) via legit means.

Zac wrote:

A direct rip serves the exact same purpose and audience as a fansub as does a DVD rip of an anime series as does a camrip of a movie. There is no daylight between them whatsoever.

Not so fast on the "audience" part there - people do care about quality as well. And while most people are generally satisfied with the quality CR puts out, quite many people can't take the compression artefact -laden mess of 360p video with hardsubs that FUNimation's free streams offer. While the HS release for Fractale 01 got ~16000 downloads, the two major fansub releases that came about 9-11 hours afterwards got a combined download count of ~32000. These releases both offer high-quality softsubbed 720p video. Usually the download numbers are the other way around, since for CR shows HS can offer mediocre-quality softsubbed 720p releases, which while not really on par with fansubs tech-wise, is still lightyears ahead of what FUNi's streams offer.

In other words, people do care about quality as well, and FUNi's simulcasts don't offer them - even if you wanted to pay for higher quality, like you can with CR. I know that FUNi has a DTO service (though do they even offer anything simulcasted through it?) but tech-wise it offers hardly any improvements over their free streams.

EDIT: One reason why I'm disappointed about this too is that I was honestly interested in what you guys were going to talk about in regards to the whole Fractale incident, only to hear you go on about something completely false and impossible for a large part of the segment.

Last edited by batou37 on Sat Jan 22, 2011 7:31 pm; edited 1 time in total

Daizo wrote:

I'm just rather annoyed that you guys seem to be completely out of touch with reality when it comes to anything related to fansubbing or illegal anime distribution in general. The fact that you guys seriously though that a fansub group, even a speedsub one, could possibly manage to get a release out within an hour of the broadcast and didn't doubt this for a moment clearly shows this. And honestly speaking, I'm baffled about this. When you're into anime, and anime news reporting on top of that, I'd think that you guys would keep tabs on what's going on in the "other side" as well, especially since the illegal and legal still go quite largely hand-to-hand in this niche.

This has all been an interesting argument to read. As an outside observer though I'm forced to chime in when you seem to lump all anime fans together and the niche itself when you talk about fansubs going hand-in-hand with todays anime market. That might have been the case 10 years ago, but it's really not any longer. If you have internet access, a mailing address, and money to pay for your hobby you can see anything anyone else sees legally. I'm a large anime fan, and spend thousands of dollars a year on discs, but I do not watch fansubs at all. If something sounds great I buy it. Legal simulcasting has also served to increase anime awareness both for me and new fans. There are a lot of cases though where I haven't been able to watch things because they have not been licensed in my region or have not been simulcast. Do I feel in some way entitled to see these things for free because others have? No that's idiotic. I could watch a trailer and if I like it import it and that's my choice, but other than that it's either wait for hopeful licensing or to bad your SOL. To try to justify something like fansubbing by saying you can't stop it or that it is how it's going to be anyway so I'll do it too holds no weight. Nothing in this equation is an entitlement, a right, has to be fair, or anything else, it is merely privilege to participate in by way of purchase. It almost sounds like you are trying to intimate some type of badge of honor that these groups should have bestowed upon them for what they do "for the fans." I guess the guy that sells cheap cd players he jacked from cars the night before should also get this honor for his service to the fans of music.

Last edited by silver_deeds on Sat Jan 22, 2011 7:33 pm; edited 1 time in total

Ok , I don't get what the big deal is. Zac opened the comment with "to my understanding..." and when told otherwise he posted the correction in the summery! It's not like the first segment of the show is supposed to be cold hard fact being officially reported... just "views and opinions." Sorry you feel all hurt they have this apparently poor view on speed/fansubs and streamers. It shouldn't even matter when they get out their rips (or how many are ripping from Funi or the original broadcast, because it's coming from both), just the fact that people are putting it out!

I really liked the interview today. Good to hear from Shawne again. Retail has always been interesting to me, and I learned a lot!

Daizo wrote:

The second release, which used TV broadcast video and based their subs on the FUNimation translation, came out 9 hours after the rip, and the first release with a completely original translation came out three hours after that, meaning it took the actual fansubbers 9 to 12 hours after airing to release the show.

... So how in the world do you people manage to be so god-awfully ignorant and misinformed? Did you intentionally decide to spew total bullshit in order to demonize the fansubbers or something?

Obviously if Zac and Justin were focused on demonizing the fansubbers, they would have been certain to get that right, because its easier to demonize rip groups like LazySubs than it is to demonize fansub groups that do their own translations (however badly).

In my personal view, while the action of fansubbers of material that is not available in their country, fansubbers of material that is available in their country and scumsucking dirtbags like LazySubs are all, obviously, illegal, there is no difficulty in saying that its a lot easier to demonize all of that activity if LazySubs are the postchildren for bootleg distribution.

On the confusion, I believe its likely that the RAWs went up before any of the subtitled bootlegs, and that the information on when the RAWs went up in Japan after episode 2 got tangled with the information on when the rips and then fansubs of episode 1 was released.

I do agree with the podcast that the most likely explanation is that some old fogey in the Fractale Production Committee ~ specifically, if some old fogey got the online RAW ripped from the FujiTV broadcast confused with the rips of the Funimation content and thought that the Funimation rips were the source of the Japanese RAWs.

Last edited by Daizo on Sat Jan 22, 2011 7:50 pm; edited 3 times in total

batou37 wrote:

This has all been an interesting argument to read. As an outside observer though I'm forced to chime in when you seem to lump all anime fans together and the niche itself when you talk about fansubs going hand-in-hand with todays anime market. That might have been the case 10 years ago...

Ha, I was expecting a post like this to pop up. I initially decided to include an additional sentence to prevent it, but I decided to see if there's anyone who'll take the bait.

Because the fact is that when we talk about the international anime fanbase, legal and illegal most definitely still go hand-in-hand. For example, trying to be a completely legit anime fan over here wouldn't make you much of an anime fan - there'd be a handful of shows that you could buy, like two series that you could have also seen on TV, and a couple shows with legitimate streams available on CrunchyRoll. Then there's a huge amount of series that are considered "classic" or "must watch" that are simply unavailable here. For example, you can't legitimately purchase Cowboy Bebop here, and pretty much any anime fan that you could call an actual anime fan knows Cowboy Bebop. Sure, some probably aren't interested in seeing it and thus are perfectly fine with the fact that it has no legitimate release over here, but for everyone else the only means to get it would be importing (which'd be "illegal" in the sense that you're not respecting territory rights), which is pretty damn expensive and time-consuming for watching something you have no idea whether you will actually like or not. I can guarantee that anyone around here who has an imported Cowboy Bebop DVD box in their shelf watched it illegally beforehand.

Not to mention that CrunchyRoll is pretty much directly aimed to people who have already been long-time fans of anime, not to anime newcomers. The fact that the site started as an illegal fansub streaming site already supports this, and the fact that they're licensing new stuff every season also tells that their service is aimed to people who keep up with the latest anime in a fast fashion, something that's pretty much impossible to do without resorting to fansubs at some point.

agila61 wrote:

On the confusion, I believe its likely that the RAWs went up before any of the subtitled bootlegs, and that the information on when the RAWs went up in Japan after episode 2 got tangled with the information on when the rips and then fansubs of episode 1 was released.

The first public raw release that went up only happened three minutes before HorribleSubs released their rip - thus even that happened after the simulcast had come out. For anything earlier, they'd have to have been monitoring Share or Perfect Dark, in which case it should've been incredibly obvious that it's Japanese people sharing encodes from the Fuji TV broadcast.

Last edited by asimpson2006 on Sat Jan 22, 2011 7:53 pm; edited 1 time in total

Daizo wrote:

.

Again, the international anime fanbase is very large. A show being licensed in America or France is hardly "licensed" for the whole international audience. English subtitles reach the largest international audience due to English being pretty much a lingua franca on the internet, thus English fansubs are the most likely to get made. And within the fansubbers that produce English fansubs, a very large amount of people don't live in the US or speak English as their first language, so it's not even a given that the fansubbers themselves could watch the show(s) via legit means.

Not so fast on the "audience" part there - people do care about quality as well. And while most people are generally satisfied with the quality CR puts out, quite many people can't take the compression artefact -laden mess of 360p video with hardsubs that FUNimation's free streams offer. While the HS release for Fractale 01 got ~16000 downloads, the two major fansub releases that came about 9-11 hours afterwards got a combined download count of ~32000. These releases both offer high-quality softsubbed 720p video. Usually the download numbers are the other way around, since for CR shows HS can offer mediocre-quality softsubbed 720p releases, which while not really on par with fansubs tech-wise, is still lightyears ahead of what FUNi's streams offer.

But if Funi was not given a higher quality there is nothing they can about it. You can only do so much with what you are given. That being said that people should still support a legal means to watch a show albeit even if it is a lower quality stream when possible.

EDIT

Now to get back on topic it was another good podcast to listen too. I do like 90% + of my anime and manga purchases from TRSI last year and the year before. I do shop from Amazon.com and Ebay from time to time, but I enjoy purchasing from TRSI.

Wow, this thread sure derailed. Let me ignore that stuff and talk about the actual important parts of this podcast (i.e. the "new" info).

First off, just an overall thanks to Shawne Kleckner and Right Stuf. You guys are just great and I can't think of anything bad to say about the site or the business itself. From actually calling my home to make sure that I still wanted the pre-order for Fist of the North Star TV Set 1 after it had an incorrect price listed and not just simply e-mailing me to somehow getting all five DVDs of Salaryman Kintaro mere days after I ordered it (it had a "We'll Get It For You!" status at the time of the order) you guys are just amazing.

And you're releases are also similarly great. While I haven't gotten around the watching Emma, the Toward the Terra movie, or Dirty Pair yet, but I certainly am looking forward to watching each of them. Also glad to see my question about the old VHS catalog asked (it's the very last "twitter question"). After DLK himself broke his own rule about private messaging over at AoD when he outright lied to me via PM about potentially hinting at what the mystery title announcement was a few months back (which ended up being Dirty Pair), I felt that I needed some sort of retribution from the man himself. Getting an answer from him about his old catalog works well enough, I guess. Yeah, I probably I deserved it after saying that Dirty Pair TV could be a possible license after only one numeric-code hint had been released, but that was just mean, Kleckner!

HyugaHinata wrote:

adam_omega wrote:

Borders carries a higher volume of manga and a wider selection than Barnes & Noble, in a lot of cases. So not only would it impact both the bottom line of manga publishers, but it would also affect the types of books they publish as a whole. It would indeed be the manga apocalypse. Dun dun duuuuun.

I dunno... the Internet retailer segment is quite well-established; the demise of Borders is likely to lead to a shift in manga purchasing habits, rather than customers giving up manga entirely.

It may take a few months for consumer behaviour to adapt, but that's the only issue I can think of.

Well, I think taking brick and mortar stores out of the equation does do a lot of damage to sales or anime/manga, simply because due to the age of the average fan, credit cards might be out of their reach to buy things online, and if you have overzealous parents that don't trust security for online purchases, you are doubly screwed. Also, without a wide audience of potential customers, you basically get locked into an endless loop of pre-existing fans keeping the cycle going, and once you look around online, free stuff will keep popping up, thinning the herd even more. It happened with anime, and while manga is carried by more than just one store and it is by its very nature far cheaper than anime, trying to sell product strictly online and going directly head to head with scanlations might be a very bad road to walk down.

[Leave the personal attacks and arguments to PM's. - Keonyn]

On topic now:
Thank you, Shawne. It was nice to finally listen to someone who has a realistic perception of what's going on and I'm very glad Nozomi/TRSI are still working hard to keep me a happy customer.

It's such a shame many of the companies whose products you sell are starting to piss me off, because this is ultimately going to hurt you and your staff.

Until Bandai, Section23/SF, and a few others get off their asses and stop selling mediocre sub-only shit, I'm not buying it at their asking price of ridiculousness. These companies should take a very long look at how Nozomi releases its sub-only titles and immediately learn from the experience.

I may not be a box collector, but I still appreciate the fact my money wasn't spent on grammar and spelling mistakes.
Loved the Aria bookmarks. Would like to see more bookmarks in the future, if possible.

I'm also appreciative of the hint you gave the old days of anime are long gone, because some people around here seriously need to take the hint instead of trying to get them back.

Looking forward to shopping at your store in 2011. Strike Witches 2 and Shana will be out soon and I'm not even going to wait for a price drop.

Let's hope 2011 sees a boost in Max Factory figma figures in the catalog. If not, there's always RACS.
Razz

asimpson2006 wrote:

But if Funi was not given a higher quality there is nothing they can about it. You can only do so much with what you are given. That being said that people should still support a legal means to watch a show albeit even if it is a lower quality stream when possible.

I seriously doubt FUNi wouldn't have any higher-quality source material than what they make available for streaming, or at least couldn't easily ask for it. For example, A-1 Pictures isn't new to the streaming game and has provided CR with 720p video in the past. There should be no reason why they couldn't provide FUNi with the same were FUNi to, for example, offer paid 720p streams.

Also on topic I was glad to hear limited edition and collectors edition talk on the podcast as well. I'm a big fan of big artboxes (I'm looking at you Kara no Kyoukai sitting in my TRSI orders), better packaging (chipboard, or even just higher grade thinpaks like the older ADV ones with good artwork vs some of Funi's like the Claymore BD ) extras, and bonus items ... and I hope to see it continue into 2011. I think if it is economically feasible that a dual type release for most series how Shawn spoke of the limited edition coming out first and then a basic or value line which is really just the discs in the case nothing fancy about it would be great. I also hope for more Japanese release BD's with English subs to be made more readily available in the future. I know I jumped at the chance for KnK (even though all I've seen is a trailer), and would for many other titles as well. Even if it's just the big titles like GitS and others of that sort I would be very likely to purchase them.

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