After attending the enlightening but slightly depressing panel, “Anime in America” at Anime Expo this year, I was made aware of the impact that fansubbing is having on the industry. Maybe, part of the panelists’ angst can be chalked up to lower DVD sales and the desire to drive those sales up through inflating the problem larger than it is (perish the thought that anyone would use the media to their end!) but most of it is probably due to the eerie sense of foreboding some had about the fate of the industry at large if something isn’t done about the fansubbing issue, in their minds.
Piracy is nothing new and most folks in the entertainment industry are finding new ways to deal with this ever evolving problem, but when is enough enough? Anime is a world apart from other media in the sense that we’re a tight-knit group occupying, a by and large, little known or appreciated niche. Where else can people, fairly easily, meet stars and producers at a convention? When was the last time you were able to see one of your fave live action actors without getting mobbed in the process? We anime fans have it really good in regards to being connected with the makers and distributors of our beloved medium. We get to give feedback on what we want to see and when we want to see it. We’re consulted on which merchandise we’d like and how much we’re willing to pay for it. You just don’t see that kind of communication anywhere else in the entertainment industry. Albeit, newer series do take a loooong to get here in translated and watchable form, but we’re still getting anime in a regular manner.
And many fans take that for granted. I get asked repeatedly where to download anime. I refuse to give out the names of sites that cater to Downloaders on my site. I understand that fansubs fill a void when anime takes too long to hit the states or be translated (hey, I watch a few fansubs, but I still buy the DVD when it comes out.) but there’s no need to download whatever is uploaded just because it’s new. And the industry heads are well aware that this time lag is a huge reason why people download anime. They’re working on getting anime released in the US as soon as it’s released in Japan. The industry is trying hard to catch up with anime fans demands on the subject of anime delivery and price pressures.
Fansubbing is a Hydra beast that may threaten to topple the industry (according to the industry itself) unless they can keep up with the times. My question to you is, if the hype is to be believed, would you give up downloading fansubs until a better way of distribution is developed? If giving up fansubs meant saving anime in America, would you do it? Would you give up anime fansubs to save the industry?
While I don’t exactly believe the hype (due to the antics of the RIAA… ), I do feel that fansubs and DVDs can co-exist.
Here’s the problem: A growing number of people want to have their cake and eat it too. Thing is, why bother paying for a slightly-lower-quality item when there’s something of a higher-quality and what’s more, IT’S FREE.
Well, most of us would love to support the industry, but when it takes a long time to get series out (at the very least 3-6 months after it’s aired), can you blame us for being impatient? Well, no one wants to buy something that they will later regret…
We also have to factor in the Japanese mindset when it comes to things like this. Many of you don’t know this, but not a lot of the money does not go back to the creators. I’d assume a generous estimate of 5% of all takings go back to the creators, half gets taken by the animation company, and the rest gets taken by the licensing company. Which then pays the creators some money to allow them to make an animated series off their work, and to accept some royalties. It’s the same for all animé-related merch. They are also rather paranoid, since if the exported goods is better than the original, the otaku would pay lots to import it, and the licensing company (and creator, to a much smaller extent) would not get as much money back. See, when a series is licensed in the US (or any other place), the licensing company of that country is entitled to a share of the money. It’s a very complicated process, and I don’t understand it much.
Here in Singapore, we’re facing something similar, yet different on so many levels: It seems like some company, which does not stick to basic business principles, wants to enforce the Berne Convention onto the community. Well, we all know how that unfolded. I am currently seething with rage over the narrow-minded and selfish community here. When both sides resort to lies and untruths to prove their points, it’s a sickening thing.
At least in America, your companies know what they want, and say their intentions out loud. It’s a good first step. They just need to stop supporting the RIAA and it’s ilk and we’d be a lot happier.
I’ve downloaded a few fansubs in my time. Okay a decent number of them. And some of them are on my list of things I wish to buy.
Yet, issues abound here.
First, the voice-acting sucks in most American-subbed anime. Why our voice-actors can’t seem to understand what’s happening, I don’t know, but it’s insane.
Secondly, is that time crunch. I can understand it taking months to re-record all the voices for the series, and have all the editing and timing issues taken care of. But it is still a long time. But this ties back into the first issue as well. If you’re going to take months, then get decent voice actors who won’t scream in a DBZ-inspired voice for every piece of dialog.
Third is the cost. For whatever reason, anime DVD’s are outrageously priced. I bought the entire first season of Firefly for twenty dollars. For that same amount, I might be able to get a DVD with three episodes on it, but more than likely the price would be 25 to 30.
Fourth is just which animes get released here in the States. While it’s getting better, there are still many animes that don’t get picked up by a licensing company because no one thinks they will sell.
Fifth is not knowing what you’re buying. I see watching fansubs as watching a series on television. After the season/series is over, then I’ll decide if I want to buy it on DVD to be able to watch it again later. Spending $100 to get a series on DVD and then not liking it enough to watch it more than once scares me. I can’t afford to do that. So, they either need to ensure that these animes get released on tv in all markets (via Adult Swim or Ani-monday, or something, but it does need to be widespread, and fairly common to all markets & cable providers) or allow them to be viewed on their websites via streaming content the way you can watch Heroes or CSI. Heck, I wouldn’t even mind having commercials the same way that Heroes and CSI do when you watch episodes on the ‘net.
If they could deal with all of those issues, then I’d be willing to buy the DVD’s upon release. In the end, if I hadn’t watched a fansub of some series, then I would not want to buy it, as I wouldn’t know how good of a story it is.
Without fansubs, I would have no idea which anime I want to buy, and I’d never buy *any*. Simple as that. I buy anime *because* I’ve been watching fansubs, liked what I saw, and decided I want the HQ version. I’d never spend that sort of money on something I don’t know enough about. I’m not sure that without fansubs there’d *be* as much of a market for anime as there currently is.
Most of the time lag is due to the Japanese mindset. First and foremost, their primary market is in Japan, where’s there’s more of a demand. should they choose to license it to a market outside of Japan, they won’t know if it will take root or not. And in places with established animé culture, it’s usually too small for them to make any money. Plus there’s always the fact that the licensing company may make a better product than what they can make.
…I guess I did learn something from m insane foray into the world of animé licensing and copyrights.
I think it’s silly to paint with such a broad brush. Fandom is nuanced, or else ADV and Geneon and everyone like them would be raking in money hand over fist and we all would be broke.
And fansubbing is a core aspect of anime fandom in the west. Fansubbing still has a role today, and while we have to recognize the negative side (namely, piracy) to our current fansubbing culture, undeniably there are benefits.
The way I see it, the typical “lol no fansubs” spiel given at a con panel like that aims at the general con goer–which are your average Narutard and people who are still watching Bleach fansubbed. That just got to stop. But hell, as much as Simoun is licensed, I wouldn’t hesitate to share my fansubs with people who are interested in checking it out because that show needs all the promo it can get.
I watch quite a few fansubs, but I also buy DVDs for the series I really like. I already buy as many as 5 or 6 anime DVDs per month. I’d say I’m making my contribution to the industry already as it is :X
Without saying anything about the fairness of fansubs either way, no. If one company thousands miles from me goes bankrupt because I didn’t buy dvds frankly, I don’t care. And besides, I’m too cynical to believe anime fans would get any better content without fansubs.
omo: free promotion is fine and all, just make sure you don’t piss off the people you are promoting it to.
If you want to make sure we don’t get ostracized by the public, we have got to make a good first impression.
…Apparently in my country, everyone is more interested in having a free lunch than caring about their hobby. They are ruining the hobby with their silly spiel, and no one likes silly spiels. In fact, with such a bad image, I don’t see how animé could ever survive in such harsh conditions created by its very fans.
So if I ever blip off the Internet, you know what happened.
No way. I buy over $1000/year of DVDs, but I keep the fansubbed versions too… they have fewer spelling mistakes. Perhaps the “industry” should consider not making dubs of every single title, and sell subbed-only versions for much lower production costs?
DrmChsr0: I’m sympathetic, but I think you said it best that it’s the fans who screwed themselves over. I hope no matter what happens to Singapore, all of us there and elsewhere learn from that example.
Because, yeah, please don’t download things like Bleach and Naruto. That’s just straight-up, inexcusable piracy by today’s standards. If you do, at least spend some money and buy it. It may be easy for me to say because the title I “pirate” are more obscure, but yeah, it’s the bottom line that counts and I do pay my dues.
I guess it goes back to the saying “there’s no such thing as free lunch.” Typical East Asian near-sightedness got the best of some of us
Rob: Simoun is going to be sub only! [/shamless plugging]
omo: Well, it’s not about Bleach and/or Naruto (Naruto sells reasonably well here, oddly enough. I assume Bleach is too.), it’s the other various series put out by this one company. And everyone’s going IT’S OUR RIGHT TO DL ANIMU BECAUSE THAT COMPANY SUCKS MONKEY BALLS and the same company is all PERCEPTION PROBLEMS.
… At least you got the gist of it.
I don’t believe fansubs are the whole problem facing the industry–if I were an average Japanese person I could just tape my anime off of TV Tokyo, but obviously plenty of Japanese people still buy the DVDs anyway. Clearly just the fact that a free alternative exists hasn’t killed anime DVD sales there, so I don’t see why it would be true here either. To use a more American example, people buy box sets of CSI in spite of the fact they could just tape it off the air themselves and fast-forward through or cut out the commercials.
What seemed to have happened in region 1 is the same thing that happened when the dot-com bubble burst–you had companies like ADV licensing everything and anything regardless of quality or sales potential, on the assumption that the market would grow 40% a year forever. It doesn’t work like that–if anime had kept growing at that rate in another 10 years it would have eclipsed mainstream entertainment in the US, and that’s never going to happen–anime is and always will be a niche in America.
DVD sales in general have flatlined, and there are reasons other than piracy, but when sales are down and shareholders are calling for your head it’s much easier to blame Jack Sparrow than to admit you misjudged the market. My wife and I have exactly zero pirated movies, and yet we don’t buy as many movies on DVD as we used to, for the simple reason that there’s a lot of movies on our bookshelf already and we’re more picky about what we add to it. Our “back catalog” of movies is built up already, and we don’t feel the need to aim for turning our living room into Blockbuster Video. My anime DVDs are the same way–I’ve bought over a hundred over the last several years, and that’s what I consider a good-sized collection–so now I restrict myself to about 20 a year to keep from it from growing out of control and ending up with a bunch of DVDs I won’t watch again.
If fansubs didn’t exist it’d be painful, because I’d miss out on series like Da Capo that I enjoyed but seem to have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting licensed, but it wouldn’t change my anime buying habits at all. I don’t buy any anime DVDs without having watched the series first, much as most people who buy a box set of “The West Wing” saw it on TV first. Without fansubs, for series that are licensed I’d rent them from Netflix, and for the ones that aren’t licensed I’d miss out on them, which would be a pity, but I don’t know Japanese well enough to import R2s. In a dark, gray, fansub-less world, I wouldn’t suddenly buy 50 anime DVDs a year–I’d buy ~20 a year just like I do today.
This turned into one long-ass comment, but I guess my point is just that choosing between fansubs and the R1 anime distributors is a false choice–every time someone downloads a fansub it doesn’t kill a DVD sale, any more than NBC showing Friends over the air stopped people from buying the DVDs. If the industry really wants to kill fansubs and make more money, come up with something better–if they delivered anime subtitled on iTunes the same day it airs on TV in Japan, with subtitles perhaps from a US partner, they’d always beat even the speedsubbers that way, and I’d sure as hell pay $1.99 an episode to do that, then buy the DVDs when they eventually make it over. Look at what iTunes did for music–at first everyone said no one would pay to download music when they could get it illegally for free, and now something like 10% of all music sales are via iTunes. The anime business is changing, but blaming fansubs for all their ills I think just shows the R1 distributors, like the music business before them, either don’t understand or don’t want to understand where the current is taking them.
Fansubbing wouldn’t have much of an impact at all if companies like ADV could do two simple things:
1) Lower prices.
2) Get their VAs to actually act a bit.
Another one is a smaller issue, but getting better editors. I can understand typos in fansubs since they’re often going for quick releases and they’re not getting paid for it, but there is no excuse for blatant typos making it into DVDs, especially when they have the gall to charge $26 a disc for it.
Like the RIAA/MPAA, this is a case of the industry looking for a scapegoat, when it’s their own practices harming them.
I paid ~$50 for cable. I watched all the TV shows I wanted to. I then went out and bought some DVDs of the series I liked the best. Netflix is nice and all, but that takes too long, plus it doesn’t have the unlicensed stuff. (I will probably get a Netflix membership later though.) So I download anime to try it out, keep stuff that I know will never make it to the US (such as Ebichu or Kogepan), delete the rest, and make a note of what I want.
I realize a lot of people don’t do this, but a couple things the industry needs to fix ASAP is 1) cost and 2) distribution methods. But I won’t give up downloading fansubs to try out the newest series.
No, I would not:
1) I want to see what I am buying before hand. I have a huge amount of DVD’s that are crap, for taking a chance on an Anime I haven’t seen before. And frankly don’t wish to be burned again. If a show is good, like Gurren Lagann, then I will buy the box set when it comes out.
2) American Dubs suck. There is a rare one that is decent enough to listen too, but I’d much rather listen to it in Japanese w/ subtitles. And too many companies don’t even bother to do a good job and check their subs. Some do crappy jobs translating, some completely omit lines, some switch to French half-way through. There is no respect for the people who want to watch subs.
3) I think their full of crap that fun-subbers are cutting into their sales. The problem is the market is now flooded w/ anime and people don’t know what to buy. The more you show something on TV the more popular it is and the more it will sell. Look at how well Dragon Ball sold, even though people could record it right of TV. And that is a Crappy Anime! If they showed more stuff on TV, the more people would be aware of it, and the better it would sell. That’s one big difference w/ the US and Japan. They get to see load of anime on TV before they go out and buy stuff, not just the 3 or 4 shows the Cartoon Network airs.
4) Fan subs are partly responsible for starting the Anime craze. The “legal” companies need to learn how to cooperate or compete w/ the fan-subbers. And not treat them like enemies. Most will stop distributing once a series is licensed.
Hahahaha~~~
Oh My Gxx~~~
Hahaha. This is such a misleading poll. When you were trying to add so many conditions to the “No” part, saying things like “the problem is not as big,” or “I don’t care,” I think you are just spoiling the poll! The result will be indefinitive, and thus unreliable.
I didn’t vote. But if you change the first option to a simple “No,” then I will vote that.
Why? Because I spend on an average of $110 on anime-related, COPYRIGHTED DVDs and CDs. I will only buy things that I’d watched or know enough about. I will d/l and watch fansub first, and after 2 or 3 episodes, if I like it, I’ll buy the DVD and watch it again sometime — either with friends or family as a recommendation, or simple by myself to see from a different time and feel of it.
THE PROBLEM with DVDs not selling is NOT FANSUBS. It’s a problem of overpricing, bad marketing, and/or the environment. A DVD of a single title had never made more profit than a broadcast or a theatrical release.
And the latter releases had rarely returned the production studio profit as much as licensed accessories, products like toys or notepad, etc. Is Hello Kitty an interesting anime? No, it’s just a character in the gas. But it is sold to more than five continents and more countries than we can ever remember.
Anime make money by sponsorship, and a sponsor makes money if the anime gears the mass to buy the sponsor’s product.
These are facts, and they might still be a fact in the future 5 to 10 years.
The “industry” must understand that there’s a market for downloadable, subtitles-only anime. Hell, you could even use some form of DRM (like that in WMV) to protect those files from being freely distributed. In case of fansubs it’s the “fast delivery” and “low cost” that matter.
Eaterbread: STOP USING MY NAME T_T
Also, the industry in America (at least) is taking steps to remedy this problem by testing out new forms of delivery. Well, ADV does, anyway. Lying or not, it’s a step in the right direction.
Geez… you people should read ANN more often.
Dorasaga is right, the first option of the poll doesn’t make sense. You can’t put two options in one answer of a poll. I might well think that the problem is made up AND care about “the industry”. You should adjust the poll.
@DrmChsr0, sounds like you have a pretty good understanding on the subject. It’s very confusing to me, I admit.
@kidan, we were discussing the pricing of DVDs in our house just the other night. $25 for four episodes? The anime in question is fantastic, but, still $25?! Anime should be priced like TV series.
As to your fourth point, maybe companies should funnel their research dollars towards fans who actually pay for anime. That way, they would know they’d be giving their customers what they want. Anime in America is a business, after all.
@S Cameron, I have to agree with you about watching a series first before buying it. Just makes sense.
@omo, you say fansubbing is a core aspect for anime in the West. Now that anime isn’t as obscure as it used to be, should fansubbing still be considered core? It seems to be more of a tool to preview anime for true fans now than a gateway like it used to be.
@kiryuu, it seems like maybe you use fansubs to preview anime?
@Rob, the companies say they’re going to start releasing titles with subs only to get them out faster. When that’ll happen, meh…
@suguru, very well thought out comment. As to “…if they delivered anime subtitled on iTunes the same day it airs on TV in Japan, with subtitles perhaps from a US partner, they’d always beat even the speedsubbers that way, and I’d sure as hell pay $1.99 an episode to do that” So would I and Viz thinks it’s a great idea too since they’re releasing the first 11 episodes of Deathnote online for $1.99 according to a source.
@Collin, The pricing structure for US DVDs is ridiculous but would lower prices lure in fans who never pay for anime?
@griever, Netflix rocks! ^^b. Cause of Netflix, I’ve seen some anime I want to add to my collection and I’ve previewed anime I wouldn’t wish on my arch-nemesis. It’s a pity some anime won’t make it here. I see anime reviewed on other websites that looks intriguing, only to find later that it’s not in the US and might never be.
@ KReeP-E, I’d love to see more anime on TV but I don’t want to pay $60 a month for cable to do so. But that’s just me. If I had cable I’d turn into a sweaty lump that would never leave the house. I would like to see good anime on more mainstream channels (ABC, CBS, ect.), but I think that’s a long ways off. When they get the online pay-per-download figured out, I’ll be doing my anime previewing that way.
@Dorasaga, No is no. It might seem leading but no is still no. I like to add some interest to the answers.
@EaterBread, Panelists at the Anime in America panel said they were planning on doing the downloadable subtitles only bit. Once again, when, I couldn’t say.
@MeTo, No is no. Conditions aside, no is still no.