Comment by metamet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metamet | Hacker News Reader

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> There is no practical difference between homevideo and streaming, and homevideo copies of Ghibli films are everywhere (whether official or otherwise).

There very much is.

Ghibli is preserving the "value" of the film by not allowing it to be made into a commodity. He wants people to want to decide to watch the films and have them in physical possession, rather than decide to pull it up amongst the hundreds of thousands of other options at their fingertips. "I don't want to do it because the films would be treated as cheap commodities." [1]

Their approach to merchandising might shed a little bit of light into why is doing this.

> "With regards to merchandise, we resolved not to make more than 10 billion yen. If we surpassed that number, we would gather all the associating companies and berate the person in charge in front of the whole group. Really. One time, everyone got on our case about it, saying, 'You've got to sell more.' Someone from one particular company even said, 'We could raise the sales to 200 billion yen just by ourselves.' It's not a joke. If they did that, then Ghibli's characters would die instantly. I want Ghibli's characters to have a long life.

They see more to their characters and IPs than dollar signs, and they're taking active steps to preserve it. Which is why the collectors editions of their films (Spirited Away coming Nov 12) are finely tuned and have well thought out art books. The feeling and memories they're creating are more than just the runtime.

[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2019-04-13/ghibli-...

And the thing of it is, he's got a pretty good point. Just look at what happened to music as its distribution format became more ephemeral. 40 years ago, record albums were among many peoples' most treasured possessions. Now music is just a slurry that gets piped to us 24/7, songs from different artists all mixed together into a tasteless, formless stream. We lost the emotional connection when we lost having an artifact to hang it on.

Which is why I think the vinyl resurgence is much more complicated than "hipsters being hipsters". We, as humans, like tangible things.

Personally, listening to vinyl is like reading a novel. There's a tangible "ritual" and the experience is inherently focusing and somewhat intimate... intentionally enjoying time immersed in the work of a single artist/group.

I'm no hipster - still all about Spotify and social media, but those are just for passing time.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. I think that all streaming has done is allow for easier access to music, not "less meaningful" access.

Many family members of mine LOVE music and cherish it no matter if it's an old mixtape, a vinyl, or a Spotify playlist. My friends go to concerts of bands they discovered through youtube, I found a new love of many genres thanks to these services.

The people who don't value music (value as whatever it means for your definition), are just the people who never really got into music. If streaming was non-existent, these people wouldn't suddenly magically get a love of music, they just wouldn't listen to it as much.

> Ghibli is preserving the "value" of the film by not allowing it to be made into a commodity.

I guess I disagree in the sense that it already is, and this restriction is actually devaluing the material. Ghibli DVDs are everywhere; a lot of them are not official, and make money for pirates rather than for the studio. You can only artificially restrict demand for so long, in the digital world, and that boat sailed for Ghibli productions a long time ago.

IMHO making the movies easier to distribute wouldn't impact the quality of presentation or remove the space for artistic and sentimental engagement with the material. The fact that mainstream movies are on dvd and streaming did not destroy the market for film festivals - the opposite is probably true, in fact.

One can go about "not being greedy" and enhancing experience of the material without being precious for preciousness' sake.

> Ghibli DVDs are everywhere; a lot of them are not official, and make money for pirates rather than for the studio.

See, the point is that it's OK. You are thinking about money, Miyazaki is thinking about what you'd call the UX.

It's better that someone picks a pirated DVD off the shelf, inserts it into the player, and watches the DVD deliberately, in their perspective, than mindlessly clicking on a "suggested next movie" button on a streaming service, and abandon the film half-way.

Even pirating the movie is better, since it's a deliberate action, a choice, and an effort.

>IMHO making the movies easier to distribute wouldn't impact the quality of presentation

Well, that's where you and Studio Ghibli disagree.

The idea of getting more satisfaction from getting something if it's a reward for an effort, however minor, is not new. That's why games have achievements, for example.

But there's nothing stopping me from stopping the DVD halfway through.

And who's to say I'm being drip-feed these movies on autoplay? What if Ghibli had their own service (please no, not another one lol). I would have to make the deliberate action of going to their platform, searching for the movie I want, and clicking play.

I don't see the lack of streaming as preserving value, the value should (and definetly does imo) come from the movie itself. The animation, the story, the colors, the music.

>And who's to say I'm being drip-feed these movies on autoplay?

Statistics! For Netflix, 80% of subscribers’ watch choices come from their personal recommendation engine.[1]

>But there's nothing stopping me from stopping the DVD halfway through.

Yeah, but you are less likely to do so given the effort it takes you to start.

Same with vinyl disks: I rarely don't listen to an entire side if I start playing a disk.

>I don't see the lack of streaming as preserving value

It's not the lack of streaming, it's shaping the experience.

As an analogy: Michelin-star restaurants probably don't have delivery. It's not that "lack of delivery" is driving their value, it's that sitting down there allows you to experience the food more fully.

[1]https://techjury.net/stats-about/netflix/

> Statistics! For Netflix, 80% of subscribers’ watch choices come from their personal recommendation engine.

That includes the cases when the recommendation engine just provides the easiest UI to select what you already wanted to watch.

> Michelin-star restaurants probably don't have delivery. It's not that "lack of delivery" is driving their value, it's that sitting down there allows you to experience the food more fully.

Very salient point. Fully agree.

All of these statements just made them one of the greatest companies in my book.

I think there might be a cultural/home market component too. When I was visiting japan, I was somewhat surprised about how many book stores, record stores and so on were still around and busy.

And when I looked up the stats, japan does have more CD sales than most markets too: https://qz.com/711490/why-japan-has-more-music-stores-than-t...

They're being a little precious about it all. They don't want their movies treated like cheap commodities, but in the end that's what they are.

They can't deny that all of their movies are available in high quality for free online. If they are truly worried about making too much money, then maybe they are fine with that.

And today HBO announced a deal to stream all of the Ghibli movies. I guess they finally got the deal they needed.

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