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Comment by jbay808 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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