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"If you can't make them want it, you simply don't have a business."
An excellent, excellent open letter to the anime industry.
The last section is what hits it home for me. ADV and Viz have attempted to branch out into allowing legal downloads, but their ventures were doomed from the start. Not because fans don't want legal downloads, but because ADV and Viz went about it in an entirely asinine way. ADV launched its downloads with a lineup of terrible series (seriously, Godannar?!), and now that they've branched out to offering good series (like Princess Tutu), they're still offering dubs only. I would love to be able to download Princess Tutu from the ADV website, but I want the Japanese language track, dammit. Likewise with ADV's much-vaunted Anime TV network; it took them an entire year before they started broadcasting subtitled shows, and even then, it was only during a very brief programming block. I think that's still the case. As for Viz, well... They made a big hullabaloo about offering subtitled Death Note episodes concurrent with the Japanese broadcast, and then completely fell through with that promise. Bad PR. Very bad PR.
The solutions seem so simple. Stream subtitled episodes and offer them for download, for a reasonable fee. (There are more people who refuse to watch dubbed anime than there are people who refuse to watch subtitled anime. That's a market reality.) Do it in a timely fashion. Beat the fansubbers in the timing game, or else you lose the market. Worry about DVD releases and dubbing tracks after the fact. And when you release DVDs, make them AWESOME, like the Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi DVDs. Like Sevakis said, if you can't make people want to buy your product, then you're out of business.
At this point it's impossible to stop fansubbing and piracy. So the only solution is to make a better product than what the pirates can offer. It's not THAT hard to do. So why is the industry dragging its feet?
ETA: Ask John weighs in. His point about Japanese anime companies expecting Americans to solve a problem that begins in Japan is spot-on. Like when FUNI went after those still-unlicensed fansub series earlier this year, apparently on behalf of the Japanese copyright holders. The Japanese companies target American fansubbers while completely ignoring the rampant piracy in Japan because they don't want to piss off their Japanese consumer base. Nice!
ETA 2: Jason weighs in with his two cents, and points out the obvious: that HD anime looks better as a digital video file than it ever will after it's been transfered to DVD. It was the anime companies themselves, when they rushed to embrace HD, that have begun the obsoletion of the DVD format.
The last section is what hits it home for me. ADV and Viz have attempted to branch out into allowing legal downloads, but their ventures were doomed from the start. Not because fans don't want legal downloads, but because ADV and Viz went about it in an entirely asinine way. ADV launched its downloads with a lineup of terrible series (seriously, Godannar?!), and now that they've branched out to offering good series (like Princess Tutu), they're still offering dubs only. I would love to be able to download Princess Tutu from the ADV website, but I want the Japanese language track, dammit. Likewise with ADV's much-vaunted Anime TV network; it took them an entire year before they started broadcasting subtitled shows, and even then, it was only during a very brief programming block. I think that's still the case. As for Viz, well... They made a big hullabaloo about offering subtitled Death Note episodes concurrent with the Japanese broadcast, and then completely fell through with that promise. Bad PR. Very bad PR.
The solutions seem so simple. Stream subtitled episodes and offer them for download, for a reasonable fee. (There are more people who refuse to watch dubbed anime than there are people who refuse to watch subtitled anime. That's a market reality.) Do it in a timely fashion. Beat the fansubbers in the timing game, or else you lose the market. Worry about DVD releases and dubbing tracks after the fact. And when you release DVDs, make them AWESOME, like the Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi DVDs. Like Sevakis said, if you can't make people want to buy your product, then you're out of business.
At this point it's impossible to stop fansubbing and piracy. So the only solution is to make a better product than what the pirates can offer. It's not THAT hard to do. So why is the industry dragging its feet?
ETA: Ask John weighs in. His point about Japanese anime companies expecting Americans to solve a problem that begins in Japan is spot-on. Like when FUNI went after those still-unlicensed fansub series earlier this year, apparently on behalf of the Japanese copyright holders. The Japanese companies target American fansubbers while completely ignoring the rampant piracy in Japan because they don't want to piss off their Japanese consumer base. Nice!
ETA 2: Jason weighs in with his two cents, and points out the obvious: that HD anime looks better as a digital video file than it ever will after it's been transfered to DVD. It was the anime companies themselves, when they rushed to embrace HD, that have begun the obsoletion of the DVD format.