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The Anime Economy - Part 3: Digital Pennies

TV Tokyo recently announced that Crunchyroll had nearly 70,000 paid subscribers.

Thank you for this fantastic series.

agila61 wrote:

As a side note, $6.95 is the per month rate ~ Crunchyroll also has $19.95/3mth and $59.95/12mth, and has had $50/12mth Premium (anime+drama) memberships the last two Cyber Mondays.

Although true, a lot of the "lost revenue" is covered by the fewer transactions; credit card transactions are surprisingly expensive. So it shouldn't make a lot of difference overall except for the sales.

I wonder if you could get a version of the Japanese anime business set-up here, with the simulcast services standing in for the late-night television broadcasts that usually convey the show in Japan.

The big thing that I feel the legal streamers have to do is find a way to give quality equal to a fansub. I pay for Crunchyroll, but I'm often finding myself not using it unless nobody fansubs a show fast because fansubs offer much better quality video feeds with higher bitrates. Just look at something like Steins;Gate on Crunchyroll as an example of what a badly bitrate starved anime looks like.

RyanSaotome wrote:

The big thing that I feel the legal streamers have to do is find a way to give quality equal to a fansub. I pay for Crunchyroll, but I'm often finding myself not using it unless nobody fansubs a show fast because fansubs offer much better quality video feeds with higher bitrates. Just look at something like Steins;Gate on Crunchyroll as an example of what a badly bitrate starved anime looks like.

You use a fansub leech streaming site that offers 3Kbps streaming?

Or are you comparing legit streaming to bootleg downloads?

The big thing that I feel the legal streamers have to do is find a way to give quality equal to a fansub. I pay for Crunchyroll, but I'm often finding myself not using it unless nobody fansubs a show fast because fansubs offer much better quality video feeds with higher bitrates. Just look at something like Steins;Gate on Crunchyroll as an example of what a badly bitrate starved anime looks like.

If they can figure out a way to up the bitrate to acceptable levels (like 3k instead of the 1700 or so that Crunchy uses now), I'm sure it would draw a lot more of the anime fans to it. Right now though, its tough for people to justify paying for worse quality.

Quote:

Or are you comparing legit streaming to bootleg downloads?

Downloads.

RyanSaotome wrote:

Quote: Or are you comparing legit streaming to bootleg downloads? Downloads.

Kind of an Apples to Oranges comparison there. What kind of video quality do the XBox, PS3 and iTunes downloads offer? I don't have any of the three, so I haven't seen a sneak preview of what things will look like if downloads start to catch up with streaming.

And really I feel with piracy its more productive to engage pirates with your content rather than attempting to stomp them out.

"Not paying" and "refusing to pay" are two quite different things. Every time there is a disruption in the bootleg anime supply chain, Crunchyroll forums are flooded by those that have had their viewing habits disrupted, and many of them state quite categorically that the site is legit, series "X" that has been available free streaming for several years and is coming out on DVD "is not available in the US", etc.

... in the US at least, we would have to exclude those who are still in the process of becoming educated from this "vast majority" ~ a quite substantial share of US teenagers are less than well educated in every state of the US.

Andy many of them are the same fans that do not spend on dollar of their money in a way that sees any funds flow to the industry creating the media that they enjoy.

The various surveys that report that 5% to 25% of consumers of bootleg media also buy that media implies (1) that 75% to 95% don't, and (2) that appreciably less than 5% to 25% spend money on everything they consume as a bootleg. Watching 8 series a season and buying one of them a year would count in the 5% to 25% "who also buy that media", but being the production committees for those 32 cours with a 3.125% to 6.5% chance of being the lucky production committee that got that sale is not a very lucrative proposition.

Oh, no, give them an award, as long as its a "retirement from US distribution" award, because any incremental benefit that they might have arguably provided in the past, for the majority of series each season that are licensed for streaming, at present they're just parasites in the gut of the industry.