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Answerman - Why Is Sentai Filmworks Phasing Out DVDs?

is there evidence that the additional protections added to the Blu-ray format have actually made any real difference in rates of piracy?

GSAttack wrote:

I hope that Nozomi and Sentai will at least make these Blu-ray titles a bit more affordable with all the money they should be saving from not manufacturing a DVD version.

You want these companies to offer their disc releases at even lower prices? With the exception of imports and AoA and PCUSA releases, BD anime releases are very affordable. $60-70 MSRP for 12 episodes (especially if they include a brand new dub) is fair. Companies still need to turn in profits, and it costs money to bring these releases to the market.

By the way, Nozomi also recently announced that they are dropping DVD's. I hope the rest of the publishers go BD only soon and that DVD is only used for old stuff.

I find this amusing given they are the company that for so many years was a steadfast holdout for NOT releasing titles on BD. Although from an economic standpoint makes sense, concentrating on one format means significantly less costs. The very reason I haven't understood why most anime companies didn't make a switch to BD only years ago. Most people buying DVD I have noticed already have a BD player, they just continue to buy the DVD version because they are used to it and on their setup it makes no difference. Give them no choice and they buy the BD. There are some holdouts that completely refuse BD, but I really think they have been the minority for years.

Old games? Oh boy... They never made the HD sets with the old games in mind. I sometimes think the programs that run older games in emulation on PCs work better than some of the old consoles do now. The games don't look "as bad" and they often times have filters to emulate the old look of the CRT on the computer monitors and these things actually work fairly well most of the time. But it IS a pain to have to keep and maintain older hardware (game consoles, CRTs) because sooner or later, they WILL wear out. Most likely old CD-based game systems will wear out (the drive motors) before a CRT will. A maintained CRT that isn't constantly on all-day can last at least 25-30 some years.

The fact that DVDs would get phased out in favor of Blu-rays isn't really a surprise beyond when it would happen. The bigger question is the future of physical discs in general and how 4K will fare. Given how many folks can't seem to see the difference between SD and HD (much as I don't understand that)...

You want these companies to offer their disc releases at even lower prices? With the exception of imports and AoA and PCUSA releases, BD anime releases are very affordable. $60-70 MSRP for 12 episodes (especially if they include a brand new dub) is fair. Companies still need to turn in profits, and it costs money to bring these releases to the market.

Meanwhile, for $25 you can get 24 to 26 episodes of South Park.

The economics of American television series on DVD/BD is entirely different from the economics of most anime series. US television programs are financed by the advertising revenues they earn during their initial run. Most shows have broken even after that run concludes. Revenues from domestic syndication, overseas licensing and disc sales are where the profits lie.

Anime series rarely have much in the way of contemporaneous advertising. For many late-night shows the production committees buy time from the television networks since the audiences are too small to attract most advertisers. As a result disc sales constitute a much, much larger share of total program revenues for anime than they do for shows like South Park. One consequence is that anime discs sell for higher prices than their American counterparts.

[(FUNimation has been very good at narrowing the price gap. I don't know how they do it, but I'd bet that's a major factor on why they're America's biggest and most well-known anime localization company: They're able to get the audience who are into anime but won't buy any home video releases for more than $30 unless it's a multi-disc pack.)

Most interesting. Do regional restrictions still apply when using it, or does the decryption process bypass them entirely?

Zin5ki wrote:

Most interesting. Do regional restrictions still apply when using it, or does the decryption process bypass them entirely?

Bypasses them entirely. I got this software and a Blu-ray drive specifically to play Region A imports, since my only other player was a PS3 and I didn't want to spend the (at the time) hundreds of dollars on a second standalone player.

It's too bad that the companies making this stuff can't/won't just sell us the discs without any restrictions and let us easily watch what we paid for. They seem to think that they need to control how we watch the stuff.

Of course, the fact that many folks do willing pirate stuff when they can doesn't help, but those of us who are actually willing to pay for the shows that we watch end up suffering as a result.

I guess I'm old... I still remember the shockwaves when Blockbuster announced they would soon stop purchasing VHS, and that tapes in inventory would be replaced with DVD's as the tapes wore out. (This would have been in the late 90's or early 00's.) In the pre-streaming world, obsoleting an entire media system was *huge*.

Their 2007 announcement that they were doing the same with BD over DVD's caused barely a ripple. On one hand, the two media could played on the same player. On the other, Netflix was already eating Blockbuster's lunch and though it didn't know it yet Blockbuster was essentially dead. (Not only because of Netflix and Redbox, but the nascent streaming services too.)

I definitely held out for a long time. My worry is when Europe/Australia goes BR only because I still haven't found a good player to play International BR in the way I can play International DVDs. Region coding sucks. And I am worried about when my current DVD player goes and I can't play the non-region 1 DVDs I have if they stop making DVD players all together. Although it did take them awhile to stop making VCR's.

The question is with the move to digital will anything eventually replace the BR?

Something most people don't realize regarding old game on CRT TVs versus HD TVs is that HD televisions have a very small amount of lag between your input and what you'll see onscreen whereas a CRT has negligible lag (it's at the speed of light, which is fast enough that the human brain can't really perceive the lag). As a result, some of the hardest of the hardcore retro gamers, speedrunners, and competitors will play these games only on CRTs to avoid that input lag. Modern games are built with that sort of lag in mind such that you're not supposed to realize it's there.