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Answerman - Is The Anime Glut And The American TV Glut The Same Thing?


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WingKing



Joined: 27 Apr 2015
Posts: 617
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 2:51 pm Reply with quote
There was a good column from the LA Times back in May on this topic and a dispute between Verizon and ESPN over Verizon's decision to start offering smaller and more flexible cable bundles to their subscribers. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20150501-column.html

Since anime (or at least late-night anime) isn't heavily dependent on advertising revenues or cable subscription fees to stay afloat, the circumstances there are different. The only thing that's substantially the same is having an ever-larger amount of programs all trying to compete for the same finite set of eyeballs. And Eigengrau is right...anime series in the 90s were fewer but also tended to be longer. For example, the summer of 1998 only had six new anime series premieres, and that was in part because nearly all of the 29 new shows from the spring season that year were 24+ episodes, and those were all still on the air. Also back then, if someone wanted to make an anime to promote a manga or video game but couldn't get funding for a 24-episode series, they could just make a short OVA and pop that out on the video market instead. That isn't really an option anymore.
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Arale Kurashiki



Joined: 24 Aug 2015
Posts: 773
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 3:01 pm Reply with quote
maximilianjenus wrote:
that's when you realize that the world does not revolve around you and other people find something interesting.


the article we are discussing wrote:
FX Networks president John Landgraf, who is incredibly well-respected in the business, gave a speech that freaked everybody out. We have achieved "peak television," he said, and this is too much content. Critics can't review them, viewers can't find them, and not that many of them are actually good.


I'm talking about things that are literally stated in the article, thanks. Complain to John Landgraf, not to me. And I personally am talking about shows on both sides of the planet here.

It's a lack of variety. Having hundreds of anime a year would only be overwhelming if they were all distinct, but they aren't. Pick some panty fanservice shows to watch, pick some idol anime, pick some adaptations of whatever's popular. I don't know. As it stands, though, we are actually in a drought of original works.

Anyway, there's too many books being produced for people to reasonably read them all too, but that's not seen as a problem. Nobody should be expected to view all the fiction. Humanity is massive. Just enjoy whatever you'd like.
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BadNewsBlues



Joined: 21 Sep 2014
Posts: 6267
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 3:48 pm Reply with quote
mangamuscle wrote:

1. lack translated lyrics/singalong songs. Adding translated songs will make people care for the opening/ending instead of skipping it. It can also improve sales of said songs on iTunes.


I highly doubt this due to people being incredibly picky few people want to listen to a song in language they don't understand and fewer want to listen to something that may sound awful in their native tounge.....unless it's deliberately turned into something else....cough Rock The Dragon cough

mangamuscle wrote:

2. lack translated credits. Again, people might start caring who directs their favorite shows if they translate to english the credits in the opening/ending sequence.


I think this is something for the hardest of the hardcore of anime fans especially if they become attached to a show or if they want to avoid watching another show done by a director or animator they didn't care for.

mangamuscle wrote:

3. lack translated hardcoded text. during the episode, it is common to see walls of text for a split second, it would be quite easy to trasnslate them for people to pause and read.


No one likes walls of text.

mangamuscle wrote:

5. lack aggressive advertisement. Since their audience is now worldwide, maybe coca cola and similar would have paid a fortune in advertising in last season Hinouto, umaru-chan, to name one.


Aggressive advertisement of almost any sort is generally frowned upon by some people.

mangamuscle wrote:

6. Late dubbing. One year or two is too much time for dubbing a series, if they know a show is going to be huge (i.e. AoT) they should invest in dubbing it asap.


You can never know if an anime dub is going to be a hit or a miss that's always been the risk behind licensing a series.
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PurpleWarrior13



Joined: 05 Sep 2009
Posts: 2034
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 3:59 pm Reply with quote
I'm the weirdo that doesn't keep up with new anime shows, and pretty much just sticks to stuff already completely out. I'm pretty much the same with TV. Other than the stuff I'm in, the only new show I regularly watch is Scream Queens (and even then, only on Hulu). I haven't been much of a linear TV watcher since 2004 when Cartoon Network went downhill. I did watch some Boomerang, Reelz, and TCM for a while, but now it's pretty much JUST Toonami if anything.

And I know the bubble of the "golden" TV age is definitely NOT here to stay. There are so many shows coming out trying to be the next Breaking Bad, it's over-flooding the market. There's also a million streaming services trying to be the next Netflix. It's scary to see where it's all headed, and I don't even know how long Netflix is going to be here.
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meiam



Joined: 23 Jun 2013
Posts: 3447
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 4:04 pm Reply with quote
The anime company just need to get smarter and talk to each others and 200 a year would be sustainable.

But look at this season where we have 3 LN show with extremely similar premise. The people who want that just get overwhelmed (and then the rest of the year they starve) and the people who don't care just roll there eye and start to doubt.
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Rederoin



Joined: 29 May 2013
Posts: 1427
Location: Europa
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 4:32 pm Reply with quote
Touma wrote:
This was yet another interesting and informative article.
Thank you, Justin.

I do not watch TV, and have not had cable or satellite service for at least a decade, but I was still curious about how all of those shows and networks managed to survive. So the part of the article that was about US TV was actually more interesting to me than the part about anime.
But both were well worth reading.

There is something that I am still curious about with the anime.
I cannot really grasp the implication of 200 shows per year, especially since not all shows are the same length.
I think that I could understand it better if I knew how many episodes per week are being made.

Going by those listed on MAL, not including movies/ovas/specials etc...

67(this season) + 69(Summer/spring leftovers and longrunners) = 135 episodes per week.
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whiskeyii



Joined: 29 May 2013
Posts: 2266
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 4:47 pm Reply with quote
I do pay for cable, but I watch very little on it; The Amazing World of Gumball, Gravity Falls, and Steven Universe, plus the odd show on the Science channel, Good Eats on the Cooking channel, and whatever sounds good on TCM.

I've never bothered with Netflix, mostly because I spend all day in front of a computer and vegging on my couch is a good way around that. But I might look into finally getting Netflix, if only to see if the kinds of shows I like to watch are easier to find there.

Though I would, in all honesty, feel pretty skeevy watching at least the Cartoon Network shows off-screen, since I haven't been able to find a legal way to watch them online. :/
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Rederoin



Joined: 29 May 2013
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 4:50 pm Reply with quote
Arale Kurashiki wrote:

It's a lack of variety. Having hundreds of anime a year would only be overwhelming if they were all distinct, but they aren't. Pick some panty fanservice shows to watch, pick some idol anime, pick some adaptations of whatever's popular. I don't know. As it stands, though, we are actually in a drought of original works.

I disagree, I really have not noticed a decrease in variety since earlier years.
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mangamuscle



Joined: 23 Apr 2006
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Location: Mexico
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 5:08 pm Reply with quote
BadNewsBlues wrote:
I highly doubt this due to people being incredibly picky few people want to listen to a song in language they don't understand


Even those few would be an extra income for the japanese music labels vs. the smallish cost of translating said song, specially if they send the lyrics sheet to the translator beforehand.

Quote:
and fewer want to listen to something that may sound awful in their native tounge.....unless it's deliberately turned into something else....cough Rock The Dragon cough


Dubbing the songs to english might be a good idea if a show is going to shown in broadcast TV or Netflix and has at least 26 episodes.

Quote:
I think this is something for the hardest of the hardcore of anime fans especially if they become attached to a show or if they want to avoid watching another show done by a director or animator they didn't care for.


When people can easily pause any frame of the video, you will be surprised at how many people get into looking at the end credits, specially if they liked a series. The cost of translating credits would be negligible.

Quote:
No one likes walls of text.


That is the reason they are shown on screen for less than a second, but even then people recognize a wall of text that uses characters they cannot pronounce, most people rather have they use the alphabet for said walls of text (even if the language used is german or italian). Again, this would cost nearly zero, since animators are also using text fonts for their walls of text.

Quote:
Aggressive advertisement of almost any sort is generally frowned upon by some people.


Most people would not care if Umaru had swallowed Coke/Pepsi/etc. or if all the cars shown in a series are only from one real life brand, specially if that helps a second season come along.

Quote:
You can never know if an anime dub is going to be a hit or a miss that's always been the risk behind licensing a series.


Yeah, but if they are going to take the plunge, better do it while it is still fresh.


Last edited by mangamuscle on Fri Oct 16, 2015 5:26 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Lili-Hime



Joined: 05 Jun 2014
Posts: 569
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 5:14 pm Reply with quote
whiskeyii wrote:
Though I would, in all honesty, feel pretty skeevy watching at least the Cartoon Network shows off-screen, since I haven't been able to find a legal way to watch them online. :/

While they don't have the most recent episodes, Hulu has pretty much the entire Cartoon Network catalogue except for the most recent season of a show. Best part is though Hulu usually has commercials, the CN stuff only has short 5 second spots advertising the time of the show you're watching; so it's essentially commercial free.

EricJ2 wrote:
but because we have a generation that grew up on The Office and The Simpsons, we now have a comedy-impaired generation that believes Comedy is about the right to act like snarky immature responsibility-avoiding manchildren, and still have a job and family.)

I applaud you Anime hyper It's so, so annoying to deal with manchildren who think that they're being 'funny and edgy' by acting like Peter Griffen or repeating south park lines Rolling Eyes Simpsons started out great but when the show became all about homer keeping his family and job while being dangerously inept and borderline abusive, well... yeah.

I'm a weird one. I only had cable on and off as a child because my mom didn't like it and would rather us play outside or read books. Aside from a 1 year period where I accidently had it for free, I've not had cable at all for like 10 years. So... I could care less about what's on tv. All the anime shows coming out now I think is a good thing, because in spite of a lot of stuff looking the same, it does allow for more diversity. In the 90's we got like... three yuri shows the whole decade. Since the mid 2000's we've been getting at least 2 a year, if not more.
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Saturn



Joined: 08 Aug 2002
Posts: 513
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 5:16 pm Reply with quote
Arale Kurashiki wrote:

Anyway, there's too many books being produced for people to reasonably read them all too, but that's not seen as a problem. Nobody should be expected to view all the fiction. Humanity is massive. Just enjoy whatever you'd like.


Certain genres of fiction absolutely have gone through the bubble/burst rhythm just in recent years: YA fiction (particularly distopia fiction), zombies, mashups, etc; even non-fiction sometimes sees a glut of books all on the same topic at once, creating the same issue of too many books and not enough readers (for example, when I was in college studying history there was a year wherein no fewer than four well-publicized biographies of Mao Tse-tung came out-- that doesn't seem like a lot, but there's a relatively small market for such publications).
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Touma



Joined: 29 Aug 2007
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Location: Colorado, USA
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 5:41 pm Reply with quote
Rederoin wrote:
67(this season) + 69(Summer/spring leftovers and longrunners) = 135 episodes per week.

Thank you.
That really is a lot of anime.

I doubt that anybody would be interested in everything that is on, but with that much to choose from every day it could get difficult to watch everything that you wanted to.
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Mr. Oshawott



Joined: 12 Mar 2012
Posts: 6773
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 5:41 pm Reply with quote
Although I have cable, I don't watch nearly as much of it as I did 10+ years earlier. From my perspective, the selection has gotten stagnant and the commercials seem to last longer than they did in the past. Hence, I rely heavily on the Internet to find content that I want to watch.
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Maize Hughes



Joined: 28 Aug 2011
Posts: 81
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 5:49 pm Reply with quote
Justin,

Earlier this year I did a back of the envelope calculation of the "size" of the anime industry. It works out that there's about as many minutes of anime episodes per year as there are minutes of American movies produced per year. (in 2014)

That seems about right. A dedicated person could probably watch every episode of every anime airing a year - not that you'd want to. And we know that there are people paid to watch (almost) every movie that plays in a year. But 371 scripted shows...! That's too much content. Even assuming 18-20 minutes of content per episode, (i.e. minus commercials) and a 12 episode run before cancellation, that's 1337* hours in production. Or about 650+ feature length movies. Just to sample 371 shows would take almost three weeks at 40 hours per week. (Which actually explains a lot - it's a small enough number that a professional in the TV business could keep track of "what's out there" so long as they didn't have to actually watch all of it. So, executives, basically.)




*1335 due to rounding errors. But still! Over 9000 minutes! (80,000)

--------------------------------------------------------------------
For what it's worth, I used these assumptions when I did my math:

4 coeurs X 12 episodes X 23-25 minutes X (some average number of shows per season)

For US movies, I assumed a 90 to 120 minute running time, multiplied by the total number of movies listed for 2014 in imdb. (Not that I remember which list I used.)

There's some significant room for error in that math. People tend to skip OP and ED bits for shows, so there's usually 3+ min per show, per episode that don't really "count". And so on.
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Rederoin



Joined: 29 May 2013
Posts: 1427
Location: Europa
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 6:05 pm Reply with quote
Touma wrote:
Rederoin wrote:
67(this season) + 69(Summer/spring leftovers and longrunners) = 135 episodes per week.

Thank you.
That really is a lot of anime.

I doubt that anybody would be interested in everything that is on, but with that much to choose from every day it could get difficult to watch everything that you wanted to.

A bunch of those are shorts, although I have no idea how many.


As for what to watch, the split is also important. I don't think many people acteally want to attempt watch everything, the more hardcore otaku will probably just try out all late nigth anime show, while ignoring most of the day-time shows.
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