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Answerman - Is Anime Streaming Consumer-Friendly Right Now?

Saidah Gilbert wrote:

Perhaps anime streaming needs to be like cable TV?

I'm not sure what it's like in Trindad and Tobago, but in the US cable TV is very expensive compared to Anime streaming services. For the price of a cable TV subscription you could subscribe to ALL the anime streaming services and still have money left over.

jakewil85 wrote:

Netflix - simulcasting and standalone anime subscription

While I can see why their lack of simulcasting may be a problem, I'm not really seeing why Netflix would ever do standalone anime subscriptions. Netflix doesn't do standalone subscriptions for anything else it has. There's no reason it'd make an exception for anime.

Daizo wrote:

In terms of subtitle styling, Crunchyroll has always been the leader of the pack, but they've also been hopelessly behind fansubs since their inception. Sentai is basically the only other company that tries to do some sign styling, while with everyone else it's pretty much a joke. No-one certainly seems too interested in reaching higher in this regard, even when they're hardsubbing the signs into the video and could really do anything (including reaching the level of fansubs).

This is something I find kind of interesting about anime fans: They go all out with fonts and colors and such. Among foreign film viewers, they don't care one bit about that, and many would even find it distracting as it calls attention to itself.

Personally, I prefer my subtitles to be as plain as possible. I want to forget I'm reading something at the bottom of the screen. I've seen some fansubs for stuff like One Piece where they'll actually animate the letters and such, and it always got annoying to me because it felt like they're saying, "Look at us! We made these subtitles!"

Daizo wrote:

Beyond this, something I feel the article didn't address enough was the fact that even in the current situation with multiple services, there are ways in which things could be improved without completely overhauling the system. Namely, by actually letting people digitally buy series. And by buy I really mean buy, ie. giving the users DRM-free downloads. The European anime company Wakanim recently expanded their service to Scandinavia, and beyond offering the usual subscription service for watching stuff online, they also let you actually buy series digitally at reasonable price (1€ per episode or 10€ for a cour, ie. 10-13 episodes depending on the series). The video quality is also really good, beating out even Amazon. So while it might be a bit annoying that they've nabbed some local licenses from Crunchyroll (which I have a subscription to), at the same time I'm actually glad for this when it comes to series I really like and want to own, because Wakanim enables this and actually delivers good quality products (well, they do have plenty of room for improvement in terms of subtitle styling, but seriously the video encoding is really nice).

Something DRM-free AND pay-to-own would terrify the content owners though, as there's theoretically nothing preventing you from creating copies of it and sharing it with everyone you know. How did the anime companies let Wakanim get away with this, and how has Wakanim remained profitable in this way?

Halko wrote:

Going down that path will just mean that there will be no more indie success stories. Your either double platinum or not selling a single record and homeless.

Hope is not lost for the indie scene, but for a totally different reason: Unique to the music industry, or at least stronger in it than any other medium by a longshot, is a "fight the man" kind of mentality, and this includes supporting local and small-level bands and musicians and, inf act, buying physical albums from them. It's strong enough that indie groups can survive and be profitable (or at least not homeless), though they'll have problems breaking out and upwards. (Some bands aren't too interested in that though.)

I honestly don't know what the future of the music business will be though. Perhaps they'll be centered around licenses as songs get used in other media. (I can't make heads or tails out of Spotify's business structure, really. I thought they'd be supported through ads, but apparently not?)

That's a lot of services to subscribe to, especially for the young and broke (as anime fans tend to be),

This is something I find kind of interesting about anime fans: They go all out with fonts and colors and such. Among foreign film viewers, they don't care one bit about that, and many would even find it distracting as it calls attention to itself.

Personally, I prefer my subtitles to be as plain as possible. I want to forget I'm reading something at the bottom of the screen. I've seen some fansubs for stuff like One Piece where they'll actually animate the letters and such, and it always got annoying to me because it felt like they're saying, "Look at us! We made these subtitles!"

Your efforts are worth what people will pay for them, no more, no less. Do you have ANY IDEA how many restaurants, stores, book series, manga, TV shows, etc that I LOVED but will never get more of because my personal interest was not enough to sustain them? I bought JAPANESE laserdiscs back when they were like $100 for 2-3 episodes and STILL saw series that I was following evaporate. So telling me musicians still need to tour rather than being able to earn a living wage just on royalties doesn't do a damn thing to earn my sympathies.

Another reason for my above comments is that I think the "future" is a return to the past. The one thing the music industry has going for it is people still appreciate it as a "performance" medium. In many people's minds nothing beats the "fidelity" of a live performance, and thus a musician can ALWAYS (assuming they have anything people want to hear) earn a living performing. Yes, it's convenient when they can live off of NOT performing (ie. recordings) but if not, they can just go on tour. If they don't like that, then they shouldn't choosing PERFORMING as a career.

To clarify: I also don't like these kind of "attack effects" or other animated nonsense with the dialogue (however, there is a time and place for certain minimal effects even for dialogue, eg. giving a fade to a line that matches up with an onscreen fade). What I was talking about was sign typesetting, ie. how translation for on-screen text it handled. Generally speaking, the ideal for typesetting is for the translation to blend in as much as possible with the original to minimize distraction and reproduce the effect of the original in the target language viewer. For example:

...

With good typesetting, not only does onscreen text become more clear for the non-Japanese viewer, it also ends up being less distracting since it doesn't clash with the original. Official subs have been notably lackluster in this department, though - with companies like Funimation and Aniplex, you generally get unformatted walls of text at the top of the screen at best. Crunchyroll tries the most, but they're limited by their usage of softsubs and the capabilities of their subtitle renderer. Sentai also tries to do it and hardsubs the results, but sadly their styling sensibilities are pretty... lacking.

...

Also, as for why you mainly see this with anime and not (foreign) films in general, it's because anime is pretty unique in terms of how much it actually ends up using on-screen text, as well as how relatively easy it is to replicate said on-screen text in a translation due to the limited nature of the animation.

Everyone thought streaming was going to be the answer and the days of the cable bill were going to be over, but companies caught wind of this attitude and are now trying to make streaming just as expensive as a damn cable bill. The only advantage compared to cable is really being able to watch the content whenever you want on any device you want.

Halko wrote:

Now this whole argument here is total bullshit. Your essentially saying that creators should not get paid appropriately for their work.

What is "paid appropriately"? There's 2 musicians, 1 makes millions off of 1 song and another gets paid $100/night to play a gig. If you're ABLE to sell yourself to the tune of millions, bully for you. But don't whine to me that "the industry" is in a death spiral and you're not making money hand over fist from back end sales that you haven't put effort into.

Your efforts are worth what people will pay for them, no more, no less. Do you have ANY IDEA how many restaurants, stores, book series, manga, TV shows, etc that I LOVED but will never get more of because my personal interest was not enough to sustain them? I bought JAPANESE laserdiscs back when they were like $100 for 2-3 episodes and STILL saw series that I was following evaporate. So telling me musicians still need to tour rather than being able to earn a living wage just on royalties doesn't do a damn thing to earn my sympathies.