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Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

polygon.com

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Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#71

Post by Hamuko »

lstamour wrote: post #61
ivegotnoaccount wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It might be somewhat unique to ANIPLEX but I do see other anime sold this way.

The unique part of Aniplex isn't its Japanese prices, but rather its attempt at exporting its Japanese pricing to the US. Compare that 28-episode $300 Aniplex of America release to something like the Sentai's Shirobako release (24 episodes), which allegedly retails for $90 and is available on Sentai's own store for $45. And that's not even counting the fact that Shirobako is the better anime of the two.

https://www.sentaifilmworks.com/collections/new-releases/pro...

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#73

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

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.

Nimby property and development laws?

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#74

Post by alexdw_mgzi »

zdw wrote: post #12
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…

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…

As I understand it, some of the older fansubbers went "legit" as well (ADV, perhaps?). The basic distribution model is as you described, starting with an Amiga Video Toaster or other titler. Then, local anime clubs and other distributors would send them blank tapes, which the fansubber would dub with the latest episodes. Finally, people would send blank tapes to that distributor, who would dub a copy for them. After a few generations of this, the quality was quite bad in some cases.

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#75

Post by alexdw_mgzi »

JohnBooty wrote: post #67
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…

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 f…

This was never a problem in the DVD era, but started happening again with several Blu-ray releases. In most cases, these are simply "locked" rather than truly hard-subbed. (The subtitle images aren't mixed with the video, they are a separate track that cannot be disabled.)

http://www.lockedsubs.byethost7.com/

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#77

Post by vinay427 »

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…

EDIT: I can't read, sorry. Please ignore.

> But each is 6600 JPY. That's more than 600 dollars.

That's about $63 USD, not $600.

https://fxconvert.net/converter/jpy-usd/6600

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#78

Post by klmadfejno »

smaili wrote: post #42

Honestly I never understood why Netflix didn't make a stronger push to acquire them, it's such a great addition to their existing offerings and would boost their customer base as well.

I think Netflix's anime push is really strong if their goal is to get non-anime-dorks to watch anime. Most anime is pretty terrible, not unlike most tv, but unlike mainstream tv in that it has tons of uncomfortable sexism or weird pedo-inclinations. I find Netflix tends to only grab the better chunk of whats out there, and is funding some really strong original content, which I think is above the quality threshold of some of their live action shows (Great Pretender, BNA, Aggretsuko come to mind).

I don't typically expect to like a random anime, but I'm trending towards changing that opinion if I encounter it on Netflix and I don't see a tasteless panty shot of a young girl in the first 30 minutes.

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#79

Post by senkora »

vinay427 wrote: post #77
ivegotnoaccount wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EDIT: I can't read, sorry. Please ignore. > But each is 6600 JPY. That's more than 600 dollars. That's about $63 USD, not $600. https://fxconvert.net/converter/jpy-usd/6600

$63 x 10 for the complete set

Re: Sony acquires anime streaming service Crunchyroll

#80

Post by zdw »

vinay427 wrote: post #77
ivegotnoaccount wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EDIT: I can't read, sorry. Please ignore. > But each is 6600 JPY. That's more than 600 dollars. That's about $63 USD, not $600. https://fxconvert.net/converter/jpy-usd/6600

x10 boxes to get the whole series = $600
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