November 11, 2009
(via) It seems that Kurokami will be released in R1 on BD, dub-only.
Occasionally the Japanese studios have bright ideas and foist them off on some pitiable American release house. The Bandai Visual experiment of releasing titles in the US at the same time as in Japan -- at comparable prices -- was one.
Japanese fans get reamed. The price per episode can run as high as $60. (That's about what I paid for the Japanese BD of the first episode of Aika Zero.) Here in R1, we are used to paying somewhere between $6 and $12 per ep for new releases, and as little as $1.50 per episode on reissues.
The Japanese studios cannot survive on that kind of revenue. Income from DVD and BD releases is a major part of the economic calculation financing series development. And that mismatch in prices between Japan and the US has long been a source of pain and fear on their part: if our prices are so much lower, what's to keep Japanese fans from buying American disks instead of Japanese ones?
When it came to DVDs, at least it was the case that Japan was a different region code than the US. With BD's, the problem becomes even more urgent because Japan and the US are both "region A". (Not that this was ever much of a protection given that the DRM for both formats has long since fallen.)
In fact, the only thing that protected the Japanese market was the long latency in R1 releases. Yeah, Japanese fans could import American DVDs, but few would be willing to wait a year or two just in order to save money.
But the NA market is beginning to collapse and that long delay is part of it. So how then to defend the Japanese market from reimportation?
Dub-only releases would work pretty well, I think. But just as with the Bandai Visual experiment, it'll flop. The numbers don't work.
There are people here who won't buy a DVD unless it's dubbed. There are some (like me) who won't buy unless it's subbed. And there are some who don't care. When Media Blasters started experimenting with sub-only releases, they consciously decided to eschew that part of the market who would only buy if there was a dub.
That still made economic sense because a sub-only release is a lot cheaper to produce. So sales were lower, but expenses were also lower, and potentially the title could still be profitable.
That calculation doesn't work for dub-only, though. Dubs cost a lot. The cost of doing subtitles and adding a second sound track is very small by comparison. So a dub-only release would cost nearly as much to produce, but still face significantly reduced sales because people like me wouldn't buy it.
A dub-only disk costs nearly the same to produce but won't sell as well. Given that the North American market has been having trouble anyway, it won't take long before such distribution houses as still exist here will refuse to license any title if the Japanese studio insists on a dub-only release.
...a little voice pipes up from the audience: Well then, what is the solution for preventing reimportation and preserving the high prices in the Japanese market, and thus the economic viability of the studios?
Not all problems have solutions, and I don't think this one does. But the only thing that has a chance of working is long latency in NA release, just like we have now. Which is a pity; I hate long delays in NA releases, but the studios have a strong incentive to preserve them in future.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
08:34 PM
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The real problem is picking the particular fail mode. Will English-only be the reason this show doesn't sell well? Or will it be that there's just not that much demand for anime on Blu-ray? Or maybe it's just not very good? And is it because everybody already pirated it and decided it wasn't very good, or just that they heard it wasn't very good from other sources?
That it won't sell well is more or less given. But there's so many different reasons why it might not, that it's tough to point at any one of them and say "this is the point of failure".
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at November 11, 2009 08:44 PM (pWQz4)
Posted by: metaphysician at November 11, 2009 08:49 PM (vM63Z)
The way I understand it, the studio sells advertising for the show. Then it buys a broadcast slot. The combined cost of the broadcast slot and the cost of creating the show far exceeds what advertisers are willing to pay, so when broadcast is complete the studio is in the red.
DVD sales have traditionally been the main way they made up the difference, and they've always been priced high. Customers there are used to the high prices and there's no real price competition because shows are not interchangeable. (If you want Haruhi, only Haruhi will do.)
R1 sales was another potential source of revernue but as I understand it we've never been worth as much money as the Japanese DVD buyers were. The US is a bigger market, but penetration was lower, and American customers were never willing to pay the kinds of prices that Japanese DVD buyers did.
The fear in Japan has always been that US sales would lose them more than it gained them. If they lost one Japanese customer for each 5 new US customers, it was a net loss to the studio, measured in yen.
How is it different for American animation studios? The big difference here is reruns. An episode of a show can run dozens of times over a period of years, selling advertising every time. They don't do that in Japan, or almost never. (The Haruhi rerun last summer was a notable exception, and the only way they could get away with it was by intermixing new episodes with the ones that were rerun.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 11, 2009 09:13 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 11, 2009 09:15 PM (+rSRq)
Perhaps, as Avatar suggests, the bottom dropped out of the plot after that point, I dunno. I've kinda regretted not finishing it, though.
Posted by: Wonderduck at November 11, 2009 10:33 PM (4Mcos)
*nods*
Posted by: metaphysician at November 12, 2009 06:51 AM (vM63Z)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 12, 2009 09:04 AM (+rSRq)
There's relatively few big-box retailers, and additional layers of distributors to worry about, and that limits the studios' ability to offer discounted product in exchange for higher sales.
So most of them go in the other direction, aiming very-expensive releases toward the small chunk of the market that's price-insensitive (as Steven says, if nothing but Haruhi will do...)
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at November 12, 2009 10:58 AM (vGfoR)
The traditional economist's curve is that lower prices yield higher sales. But there can be other factors putting a ceiling on your sales. For instance, you may not be capable of producing more than you currently are, due to supply shortage or because you've maxed out your manufacturing capacity. That doesn't happen to be the case with the anime producers.
Or there may be an external ceiling on the customer base. You may already be selling to nearly everyone who might want the product. In that case, reducing the price won't increase sales much, if at all, but it will reduce your income. It's a losing proposition.
I think the anime producers think that's the situation they're in now in Japan. There's no benefit to be had for them to reduce price; it won't increase sales enough to compensate.
I can't say whether that's really right or not. But if that's what they're thinking, then keeping prices high makes complete sense to them. And being fearful of cut-rate reimports from North America also makes complete sense.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 12, 2009 12:05 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 12, 2009 12:08 PM (+rSRq)
Anime companies don't really have an option to go direct to retailers. Those retailers typically deal with a single distributor, who quite often only deals with a limited number of distributors. Those distributors have their own business models, and aren't going to work for free just because you want to give your customers a lower price. And you're probably only a small part of their general business line, as well, so you can't just pick up your ball and go play somewhere else; they won't care, and if you don't deal with the proper channels, even the specialty retailers won't stock your wares.
('course, the US works this way too, but the companies don't deal with distributors as much - you only have one layer of mark-up, usually. The difference is that Japan often has two or even three layers, so even if the end product is a lot more expensive, it's not like the anime company is recovering all that excess dough.)
Furthermore, they're Japanese companies - so they value (over-value) their existing business relationships and are very hesitant to work outside of them (and, to put it bluntly, are very unhappy if their partners do the same). If you are an anime company, and you decide to do an innovative direct-to-market program, or even a direct-to-retailer one, you're going to massively offend your retail distributors, who have all sorts of ways to retaliate. So even if they're making project A unprofitable, or at least only marginally profitable, you can't necessarily take that step - they're going to remember it when you're trying to sell potential-hit project B, C, D, E, and on down the line.
And you're talking about the theory of imperfect substitutes. Sure, anime series aren't interchangeable, but they're at least filling to some degree the same entertainment utility; even if you're the world's biggest Haruhi fan, there's a price level at which the marginal utility of watching more Lucky Star is greater than the marginal utility of Haruhi.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at November 12, 2009 01:31 PM (pWQz4)
Posted by: metaphysician at November 13, 2009 07:08 AM (vM63Z)
Posted by: Andy Janes at November 13, 2009 11:33 AM (ysrxI)
Enclose all spoilers in spoiler tags:
[spoiler]your spoiler here[/spoiler]
Spoilers which are not properly tagged will be ruthlessly deleted on sight.
Also, I hate unsolicited suggestions and advice. (Even when you think you're being funny.)
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