Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
arstechnica.com
Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
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Re: Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
#2Nice to see a concrete example of someone treating piracy as a market failure. The Michael Geist article [1] about it was very informative but light on actual examples.
[1] http://www.thestar.com/business/article/956637--geist-canadi...
Re: Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
#3Actually, it doesn't quite treat it as a 'market failure'. It does indeed take it seriously and beat it at part of its own game (releasing shows when people want them) but it still can't compete on price.
And I think that doesn't matter. Give people easy, legal access to the shows at a decent price and they'll pay. (Well, some won't, but some never will.) That's the best you can hope for.
Re: Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
#4> Piracy may never go away, but Crunchyroll is out to prove that "competing with free" is possible by treating piracy like a business problem.
> the site has grown into profitability, trying to take away every advantage that piracy has—including price.
I think the above two lines are very telling. It's very interesting and very encouraging to see how they are competing against a business problem like infringing sharing by providing free versions supported by advertisements as well as paid versions without advertising. It's essentially similar to many of the freemium models being used but is being applied to media. I wonder if something like this would work with books?
Re: Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
#5Actually, it doesn't quite treat it as a 'market failure'. It does indeed take it seriously and beat it at part of its own game (releasing shows when people want them) but it still can't compete on price. And I think that doesn't matter. Give people easy, legal access to the shows at a decent price and they'll pay. (Well, some won't, but some never will.) That's the best you can hope for.
Actually, they are competing on price -- they offer advertisement supported downloads for free 1 week after initial release and TV airing. This does mean they are not competing on timeliness with the free/ad version, but it's a reasonable trade-off.
Re: Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
#6Crunchyroll has gone a long way towards providing a legitimate avenue for fans to get access to anime and I hope things can only get better with time.
That's not to say there aren't any problems that need to be ironed out though. Off of the top of my head, my two biggest complaints with CR stem from the consistency of their subtitles, which can range from decent to atrocious, and the lack of availability of titles that I had been looking forward to watching. Obviously, they won't be able to get their hands on every show that's out there since they're competing with the likes of Funimation, but it'd be nice if they could wrap their arms around a greater percentage of titles each season.
It'd also help too if the Japanese studios would try to embrace the internet rather than constantly resisting against it. Sometimes, I get the feeling that they're so stuck in the PPV television rut and aren't confident enough to start releasing episodes online.
Re: Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
#7The iTunes Store works the same way. In general, if you offer content on reasonable terms, people will pay for it, otherwise they will pirate it.
Re: Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
#8Actually, it doesn't quite treat it as a 'market failure'. It does indeed take it seriously and beat it at part of its own game (releasing shows when people want them) but it still can't compete on price. And I think that doesn't matter. Give people easy, legal access to the shows at a decent price and they'll pay. (Well, some won't, but some never will.) That's the best you can hope for.
Competing by convenience can buy you a lot of price flexibility. The less mainstream the content, the more challenging piracy becomes. The iTunes model was built with this in mind: make it absurdly easy to buy any song, make the price reasonable enough to pay for the convenience. It's a smart way to deal with content.
Re: Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
#9Silly that the anime studios have not learned anything from the recording industry's last 10+ years battle with internet piracy and the success of online music stores. But I suppose it is difficult to accept that your business strategy, which has worked for many years, is now no longer working.
Re: Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure
#10> Piracy may never go away, but Crunchyroll is out to prove that "competing with free" is possible by treating piracy like a business problem. > the site has grown into profitability, trying to take away every advantage that piracy has—including price. I think the above two lines are very telling. It's very interesting and very encouraging to see how they are competing against a business problem like infringing shari…
Amazon is trying this (poorly IMO) with the Kindle by offering a slightly subsidized model that will show ads at certain points. I say poorly though, because the subsidized price isn't much lees than the normal price, at least making it seem pointless to me to trade $30 now for ads for the rest of the life of the device...