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Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

polygon.com

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Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#61

Post by lstamour »

ivegotnoaccount wrote: post #32
Hamuko wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's still this way; you can buy anime box sets in the US for an entire series that costs less than a single episode in Japan. Clearly you have never bought anything published by Aniplex of America (not that I'd blame anyone for that). PERSONA5 the Animation Blu-ray is $300 (allegedly down from $400 retail) for 28 episodes. https://www.rightstufanime.com/PERSONA5-the-Animation-Blu-ra...

Japanese animation blu-ray are often, as strange as that may sound, even more overpriced: After a quick look, Perdona5 seems to have at least 10 boxes. Not ridiculous since they tend to contain 2-3 episodes. But each is 6600 JPY. That's more than 600 dollars. Even in VOD, I've seen some website that make you pay 150 JpY per episode... And 4000JPY for the last one. The US prices are high compared to France ones (we ca…

Wow. I had no idea. On Amazon.jp, sold by Amazon.jp, Persona5 anime is broken into volumes, each with 2-3 episodes: Volume 1 is ¥5,958 and has 2 episodes, volume 2 is ¥6,695 with 3 episodes, etc. It's priced like you're buying a limited edition movie as 3 episodes might be roughly the same length. Browsing other ANIPLEX releases on Amazon.jp, it doesn't appear to be all that unique to Persona either. SAO Alicization appears to be similarly priced and released in small 2 episode volumes. It might be somewhat unique to ANIPLEX but I do see other anime sold this way. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (Season One) is only broken into two parts, ¥5,198 and ¥6,061 each on Amazon. This seems more reasonable. In Canada it retails for roughly CA$50 each part, though reviews complain that the boss fight isn't over until you watch part 2 of the season and reviewers say they prefer buying a box set with the full season rather than just one part...

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#62

Post by makomk »

hamolton wrote: post #52
mindcandy wrote: post #4

A billion dollars is not bad for a site that started as a fake-it-til-you-make-it piracy site. I only know the story 4th-hand. But, my understanding is that it started as a user-upload site (I.e. piracy with disclaimers). And, of course, the seed users were actually employees with puppet accounts pirating media to their own site. That kicked off real users who competed on getting the highest quality subtitle jobs upl…

I don't know if this is true, but I read somewhere that Pornhub/Mindgeek was a "fake-it-til-you-make-it piracy site", and still is for studios that aren't active about takedown requests, except with their money they were able to buy a lot of the IP from studios that had shut down due to streaming.

That's more or less true of all the tube-style porn sites (of which Pornhub ended up the biggest an Mingeek ended up owning most of them), but it's also a little different in that, much like YouTube, they were ostensibly intended to allow people to upload their own videos that they'd created and quite a few did. Honestly, I think the commercial porn industry saw that as just as much of a threat as the actual piracy and a lot of the hostility came from permitting this kind of user-created content.

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#63

Post by sneak »

gazab wrote: post #47
coopsmgoops wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Spotify?

Yup. You could sometimes find scene release group names in the metadata when Spotify beta launched. They cleaned it up in the "great purge" where 90% of my playlists became empty :)

Now, these same sites that grew to prominence based on the efforts of pirates are now going to lengths to thwart them.

Is there a better example of pulling the ladder up behind you than this? I can't think of one.

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#64

Post by Bayart »

ivegotnoaccount wrote: post #37
jrockway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Crunchyroll was successful because Japanese media companies considered the US market a joke. The companies that distribute anime in Japan never tried to sell into the US, they just assumed we weren't interested. Crunchyroll could then show up, say they had some customers willing to pay, and decided $LOW was better than $FREE. It's still this way; you can buy anime box sets in the US for an entire series…

I don't know if there's just that: Many French anime physical release, especially those handled by the now dead Déclic Images (they started selling something they did not have the right for as a counter-offensive against those that bought the rights, if I remember well), are quite cheap. And are soft-subbed. To the point where I often hear it as an explanation of why so few animes get DVDs in France. But at the same…

>they started selling something they did not have the right for as a counter-offensive against those that bought the rights, if I remember well

They've sold several series without having the rights and nobody would work with them anymore.

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#65

Post by [deleted] »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #55
trothamel wrote: post #5

This is interesting because it means the two big distributors of anime in the US are now one. It's creating a monopsony from the perspective of the anime studios, though I suspect a rival will emerge shortly.

I've actually noticed Netflix adding more 'big' anime titles to their offerings. Mind you, that's in NL where Funimation is not available and Crunchyroll has limited offerings, so license wise it may be a different thing.

[deleted]

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#67

Post by JohnBooty »

jrockway wrote: post #15
zdw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anime fansubs have been around for 3-4 decades (ever since the early Amiga could overlay subs) and digital for 20+. Interesting that it worked out for them, unlike what happened with music distribution, and then the Napster/iTunes/Spotify evolution. Probably helped that there was only extremely slow and expensive legitimate distribution channels and actual work was required to make the content accessible in other lan…

I think that Crunchyroll was successful because Japanese media companies considered the US market a joke. The companies that distribute anime in Japan never tried to sell into the US, they just assumed we weren't interested. Crunchyroll could then show up, say they had some customers willing to pay, and decided $LOW was better than $FREE. It's still this way; you can buy anime box sets in the US for an entire series…

    It's still this way; you can buy anime box sets in the US 
    for an entire series that costs less than a single episode in Japan.
Yes -- this was their main fear. Japanese audiences "reverse importing" discs sold in overseas markets.

Western markets may be "a joke" in terms of sales for exported Japanese-market anime, but it's also essentially free money for the makers of that anime. ADV, Disney, and others wrote some fairly big checks to license series back in the day.

They produce a show for the Japanese market, and if they are lucky they can score some nice checks from overseas distribution for essentially no additional effort on their part.

    They segment the markets by burning English subtitles into the actual video.
I'm sorry, but this is mistaken. I've been collecting this stuff for decades and was once a reviewer who got quite a few review copies from ADV and others.

Perhaps there have been a few specific examples I'm not aware of but I've never once seen this. Well, except for the VHS era when obviously soft subtitles were not an option.

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#68

Post by JohnBooty »

mindcandy wrote: post #4

A billion dollars is not bad for a site that started as a fake-it-til-you-make-it piracy site. I only know the story 4th-hand. But, my understanding is that it started as a user-upload site (I.e. piracy with disclaimers). And, of course, the seed users were actually employees with puppet accounts pirating media to their own site. That kicked off real users who competed on getting the highest quality subtitle jobs upl…

Good summary. I actually did not know about CR's grey-market roots.

    That kicked off real users who competed on getting the
    highest quality subtitle jobs uploaded quickest after the first 
    broadcast of a given show in Japan.
This has definitely been a thing since before CR!

Before CR "went legit" the non-Japan market for anime was severely underserved. You could download illegal fansubs for free, often within 24 hours of its broadcast in Japan. Or... you could pay major $$$ for official US releases years later. And a lot of series were never released here at all.

* VHS/DVD/BluRay sales clearly indicated that plenty of folks wanted to pay for this stuff.

* Fansub torrent stats clearly indicated that plenty of folks wanted this stuff sooner than the industry was giving it to them.

And yet, somehow, it took about 15 years for the industry to bridge this gap. As somebody on the fringes of the industry, it made me want to scream. It didn't exactly take a major leap of cosmic brainpower to realize that while not all fansub-downloaders would pay for this stuff, this was the hardcore segment of the fanbase and certainly some of them would.

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#69

Post by treeman79 »

sneak wrote: post #63
gazab wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. You could sometimes find scene release group names in the metadata when Spotify beta launched. They cleaned it up in the "great purge" where 90% of my playlists became empty :)

Now, these same sites that grew to prominence based on the efforts of pirates are now going to lengths to thwart them. Is there a better example of pulling the ladder up behind you than this? I can't think of one.

Hollywood is in California because film makers didn’t want to pay royalties to Edison on cameras.
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