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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

Anime fansubs have been around for 3-4 decades (ever since the early Amiga could overlay subs) and digital for 20+.

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.

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I think that Crunchyroll was successful because Japanese media companies considered the US market a joke. The companies that distribute anime in Japan never tried to sell into the US, they just assumed we weren't interested. Crunchyroll could then show up, say they had some customers willing to pay, and decided $LOW was better than $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.)

>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.

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...

Japanese animation blu-ray are often, as strange as that may sound, even more overpriced:

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)

Wow. I had no idea. On Amazon.jp, sold by Amazon.jp, Persona5 anime is broken into volumes, each with 2-3 episodes: Volume 1 is ¥5,958 and has 2 episodes, volume 2 is ¥6,695 with 3 episodes, etc. It's priced like you're buying a limited edition movie as 3 episodes might be roughly the same length. Browsing other ANIPLEX releases on Amazon.jp, it doesn't appear to be all that unique to Persona either. SAO Alicization appears to be similarly priced and released in small 2 episode volumes. It might be somewhat unique to ANIPLEX but I do see other anime sold this way. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (Season One) is only broken into two parts, ¥5,198 and ¥6,061 each on Amazon. This seems more reasonable. In Canada it retails for roughly CA$50 each part, though reviews complain that the boss fight isn't over until you watch part 2 of the season and reviewers say they prefer buying a box set with the full season rather than just one part...

>It might be somewhat unique to ANIPLEX but I do see other anime sold this way.

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...

EDIT: I can't read, sorry. Please ignore.

> But each is 6600 JPY. That's more than 600 dollars.

That's about $63 USD, not $600.

https://fxconvert.net/converter/jpy-usd/6600

$63 x 10 for the complete set

Thanks, sorry, I completely missed that.

x10 boxes to get the whole series = $600

Do most japanese people actually consume these series like this or use some free broadcast / website to see it with ads like most TV is done? Or far cheaper rentals?

I imagine most Japanese people just watch it on TV / record it. I believe DVRs are still popular in Japan. The 12th most popular TV/video product on Amazon.co.jp is a 1 TB Panasonic Blu-ray recorder.

Japanese and rights management and growth just don’t coincide in a same sentence without some negatives.

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.

I don't know if there's just that: Many French anime physical release, especially those handled by the now dead Déclic Images (they started selling something they did not have the right for as a counter-offensive against those that bought the rights, if I remember well), are quite cheap. And are soft-subbed. To the point where I often hear it as an explanation of why so few animes get DVDs in France. But at the same time, Wakanim sells DRM-free episodes that are soft-subbed for 1€/episode. We are talking about a 95% discount compared to Japan here. Hope this won't change with this new quasi-monopoly.

>they started selling something they did not have the right for as a counter-offensive against those that bought the rights, if I remember well

They've sold several series without having the rights and nobody would work with them anymore.

Oh, did not know there had been other series in this case.

When I visited Japan I was astounded by the high price for animation. I naively expected that buying from the source would be cheaper but... think 5000~7000 JPY for one DVD disc of a seven disc series.

For DVD at least, Japan is region 2 (same as EU). I don't know about Blu-ray.

Wells it's a niche, for something where the entry cost seems high. I recall some low-estimate of how much a 25 minute episode costs that was around 80k$ for entry-level quality. It's hard to know if that's right, but if it is, that puts a season into the million-dollar investment range even for low quality stuff. There aren't that many potential buyers plus entertainment in Japan is expensive, so they price it high. So even fewer buy it. But due to fans being ready to spend those amounts, I wouldn't be surprised if they found a maximum for profit at those price tags.

Japan is the same DVD region as the EU, but you can’t play EU DVDs because Japan players are NTSC instead of PAL in the EU.

Which is probably what the GP was referring to?

Conveniently, DVD players sold in PAL regions would often play NTSC too, although not the reverse.

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.

the ova market was pretty much entirely based on the willingness of japanese to buy rental copies. arcades have survived for similar reasons. >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_video_animation#Histo...

If hardsub is fabulous yellow impact, that's bonus points for nostalgia.

    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.

Yes -- this was their main fear. Japanese audiences "reverse importing" discs sold in overseas markets.

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.

I'm sorry, but this is mistaken. I've been collecting this stuff for decades and was once a reviewer who got quite a few review copies from ADV and others.

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.

This was never a problem in the DVD era, but started happening again with several Blu-ray releases. In most cases, these are simply "locked" rather than truly hard-subbed. (The subtitle images aren't mixed with the video, they are a separate track that cannot be disabled.)

http://www.lockedsubs.byethost7.com/

As I understand it, some of the older fansubbers went "legit" as well (ADV, perhaps?). The basic distribution model is as you described, starting with an Amiga Video Toaster or other titler. Then, local anime clubs and other distributors would send them blank tapes, which the fansubber would dub with the latest episodes. Finally, people would send blank tapes to that distributor, who would dub a copy for them. After a few generations of this, the quality was quite bad in some cases.

Back in the 90s I would send VHS tapes + some return postage money to get fansubs of animes not available in the US. It was an amazing community and no one took a profit from it.

I had a lot of fun doing this a few years later with burnable CD-ROMs exchanged by mail.

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