[...] the Anime Blog [...]

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.