Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll
polygon.com
polygon.com
That kicked off real users who competed on getting the highest quality subtitle jobs uploaded quickest after the first broadcast of a given show in Japan.
Once viewers outside of Japan learned that they could get episodes same-day as Japan, they flocked to CR. Of course, this was only possible because CR did not attempt the impossible task of convincing the producers to allow this to be possible.
Once the CR audience was high enough, there were two obvious consequences: 1) They were too big to fly under the radar and were likely to be sued soon. 2) Their audience was large enough to be offered in negotiation with the publishers for a legit contract. So, that's what they did. They offered a fair revenue split with the publishers in exchange for being a legitimized distributor.
There are lots of ways that this could have gone badly. Most piracy sites do as much as possible to exploit the material and the viewers for short-term gain. Most publishers reasonably lawyer-stomp such sites as fast as is feasible.
But, in this case it worked out. There's no way CR could have negotiated with the publishers up-front. They were starting with nothing at all to offer. No audience. No reputation. No capital. Nothing.
Their approach was not legal. But, it was small and respectful-ish enough to not be worth suing until it was large and respectful-ish enough to be worth negotiating with.
Do not recommend this business plan. Glad it worked out for them.
Is there a better example of pulling the ladder up behind you than this? I can't think of one.
This is, I believe, actually incorrect.
(the bit about fansubs is irrelevant to the overall business model)
Interesting that it worked out for them, unlike what happened with music distribution, and then the Napster/iTunes/Spotify evolution. Probably helped that there was only extremely slow and expensive legitimate distribution channels and actual work was required to make the content accessible in other languages.
Rakuten's Viki service is another interesting model - they license content, then give people early access and crowdsource the translations, where the only benefit of translating is getting the $5-10 monthly service for free.
It's still this way; you can buy anime box sets in the US for an entire series that costs less than a single episode in Japan. (They segment the markets by burning English subtitles into the actual video. No self-respecting Japanese person would buy that, right? Ironically region codes don't work because Japan and the US are in the same region! DRM fails again.)
Clearly you have never bought anything published by Aniplex of America (not that I'd blame anyone for that). PERSONA5 the Animation Blu-ray is $300 (allegedly down from $400 retail) for 28 episodes.
https://www.rightstufanime.com/PERSONA5-the-Animation-Blu-ra...
After a quick look, Perdona5 seems to have at least 10 boxes. Not ridiculous since they tend to contain 2-3 episodes. But each is 6600 JPY. That's more than 600 dollars. Even in VOD, I've seen some website that make you pay 150 JpY per episode... And 4000JPY for the last one.
The US prices are high compared to France ones (we can get 100 episodes of Monogatari Séries for 90€, but that is a discount compared to the japanese price)
The unique part of Aniplex isn't its Japanese prices, but rather its attempt at exporting its Japanese pricing to the US. Compare that 28-episode $300 Aniplex of America release to something like the Sentai's Shirobako release (24 episodes), which allegedly retails for $90 and is available on Sentai's own store for $45. And that's not even counting the fact that Shirobako is the better anime of the two.
https://www.sentaifilmworks.com/collections/new-releases/pro...
> But each is 6600 JPY. That's more than 600 dollars.
That's about $63 USD, not $600.
People pay great attention in discovering unfairness by random search and devising punishments for it ad-hoc, not much else. ATRAC3, Blu-Ray, it’s always the same; DRM makes product unusable, but technically fair, and as long as it’s technically fair and balanced, they don’t care even if a group of industries were sinking together.
They've sold several series without having the rights and nobody would work with them anymore.
For DVD at least, Japan is region 2 (same as EU). I don't know about Blu-ray.
Which is probably what the GP was referring to?
I think decoding NTSC is a subset of what's required to decode PAL, if I remember my electronics classes well enough.
Or, searching around, it might be because region 2 DVD players had to support PAL, NTSC, 50Hz and 60Hz. Region 1 is only 60Hz NTSC.
It's still this way; you can buy anime box sets in the US
for an entire series that costs less than a single episode in Japan.
Western markets may be "a joke" in terms of sales for exported Japanese-market anime, but it's also essentially free money for the makers of that anime. ADV, Disney, and others wrote some fairly big checks to license series back in the day.
They produce a show for the Japanese market, and if they are lucky they can score some nice checks from overseas distribution for essentially no additional effort on their part.
They segment the markets by burning English subtitles into the actual video.
Perhaps there have been a few specific examples I'm not aware of but I've never once seen this. Well, except for the VHS era when obviously soft subtitles were not an option.
That kicked off real users who competed on getting the
highest quality subtitle jobs uploaded quickest after the first
broadcast of a given show in Japan.
Before CR "went legit" the non-Japan market for anime was severely underserved. You could download illegal fansubs for free, often within 24 hours of its broadcast in Japan. Or... you could pay major $$$ for official US releases years later. And a lot of series were never released here at all.
* VHS/DVD/BluRay sales clearly indicated that plenty of folks wanted to pay for this stuff.
* Fansub torrent stats clearly indicated that plenty of folks wanted this stuff sooner than the industry was giving it to them.
And yet, somehow, it took about 15 years for the industry to bridge this gap. As somebody on the fringes of the industry, it made me want to scream. It didn't exactly take a major leap of cosmic brainpower to realize that while not all fansub-downloaders would pay for this stuff, this was the hardcore segment of the fanbase and certainly some of them would.
There are so many examples pro and con. Theranos is a good example of both, weirdly enough. Although it all ended rather badly, and in a spectacular way, it worked well (for certain interpretations of that word) for a long time before that. If they were able to actually leverage the billions they got into materializing the technology claims they made, they would have survived, and the crooks at the helm would still be extremely famous and well off.
That's probably worth considering when thinking about the people at the helm of a lot of these large companies, especially the ones that lose money quarter after quarter until they eventually don't. That's not a position that seems like it rewards integrity.
They easily could have suffocated it in the last 7 years.
I do. When Sony inevitably censors or localizes something they shouldn't then I can show my displeasure by using their competitors.
If Sony tried doing anything crazy with their monopsony power, studios could just license to Amazon or Netflix (or try out any number of the smaller services). This hypothetical fight would probably hurt both crunchyroll/funimation and the studios; but it would be an existential threat to crunchyroll and funimation.
Needless to say, I continue to enjoy the convenience and non-discrimination of torrent trackers.
We are lucky in that Wakanim is allowed to sell DRM-free episodes for 1€, I hope this won't change with this and the ongoing talks about removing geologist in the EU.
Years back Bandai funded "daisuki" anime, which folded. In fact I worked in the same office as the executive who needed to fold down that division. Daisuki failed due to lack of users, not content. Likewise Sony tried a home spun distribution platform too, and folded it as well.
Now years later with all that industry experience in hand Sony is moving in and consolidating. Bandai is licensing their stuff to Netflix domestically, as is Sony. Yet those contracts can switch in a moment if a domestic conglomerate secures the users. Sony appears to be making those moves and could establish Japan's strongest beachhead in the streaming wars.
Japan cannot compete with Americans easy access to Hollywood negotiations, but likewise a Japanese platform should have strong negotiations securing anime.
Stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjUtoQaRfE0
What they probably should've done is what Qidian ended up doing with webnovel.com. They should've approached the fansubbers and the release groups and offered them a job. That way they would've retained the expertise and fanbase. It would've likely caused a lot of issues like Qidian did, but they would've likely had far more success.
Alternatively, putting anime on places like Steam could've also been a good choice.
Extremely disappointing news
On top of that, the target audience has a big overlap.
People who use crunchyroll most likely have Netflix accounts already. So it probably wouldn’t benefit them significantly.
I don't typically expect to like a random anime, but I'm trending towards changing that opinion if I encounter it on Netflix and I don't see a tasteless panty shot of a young girl in the first 30 minutes.