Forum - View topicAnswerman - Is The Anime Glut And The American TV Glut The Same Thing?
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9924 Location: Virginia |
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@smatster
If that is the case, why not have ESPN and any other sports channels part of an extra cost tier that I can reject? Some how a channel that shows regional field hockey finals has become as important as one that tells me what the weather will be tomorrow. Funding ESPN and other sports channels (if any, I never checked) is not like taxpayers funding public schools. It is more like public schools funding sports programs and facilities that benefit only the handful of students that actually participate. It is done all the time but is really a waste of tax payers money. Even among those that participate in school sports all most get out of it is head injuries and arthritic joints in later life. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Advertising research executives told me they have good evidence that cutting advertising expenditures reduces the market share for established brands. It's a game with payouts similar to the famous "Prisoner's Dilemma" from game theory. More spending doesn't necessarily increase sales, but less spending can decrease them. I once read a graduate thesis on the ban on televised cigarette advertising that argued the industry wasn't all that unhappy with the decision because they could cut their television advertising budgets and know their competitors wouldn't be advertising either.
ESPN's contracts with cable operators specifically require that the channel be carried on the lowest "tier" of service. ESPN has so much market power that no operator refuses. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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In addition to ESPN, by the way, there's also the Tennis Channel, the Fox Sports block, Major Leage Baseball Channel, NBA TV, NHL TV, NFL Network, the Golf Channel, the Hockey Channel (independent of NHL TV), the Racing Channel, Universal Sports, NBC Sports, CBS Sports Network, BTN Football, the NCAA block, Prime Ticket, Altitude, the FSN block, Sun Sports, NESN, Sport South, Root Sports, and to some extent, the Esquire Network.
Live sports are a huge, huge source of ratings (to where some broadcast channels like Fox are infamous for shifting schedules around to meet their needs over their regular viewers), and sports on TV in particular have a major audience in bars, taverns, pubs, and restaurants, which are more often than not fixated on a sports network. Watching these matches is a social experience, and it isn't quite the same if it's streamed. If you ever go to a place like Buffalo Wild Wings, they will have upwards of 30 TV screens with about 8 games going on at once and maybe another 3 or so simultaneous analyses of recent and upcoming games. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9924 Location: Virginia |
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@yuna49
I figured it was something like that. That was a mostly rhetorical question directed to smatster who implied that providing ESPN at that level was the equivalent to tax payers providing funds for public schools. As you indicate it is just a network with a lot of clout flexing their money to get what they want. @ leafy sea dragon It is not just Fox, CBS only has evening news, local or national, on weekends if there is absolutely nothing sports related available. It is not that I don't realize that televised sports is very popular. I just don't want to pay for it or have it displace the little network TV I do watch. I don't watch any sports related programming unless I'm somewhere that it can't be avoided. Edit: Those who are predicting the imminent demise of cable due to streaming need to keep a few things in mind. Really large organizations tend to die really slowly or, more likely, change themselves to cope with changes in society. I remember when TV was supposed to kill movies. Obviously no one was going to go to a theater when they could stay at home and watch enough to fill their spare time, for free. However, even from the beginning, movie studios rented/sold their older features to TV stations starving for content. Old cartoon short features intended for movie theaters had a new life on TV. Then they found they could wring a few more dollars from shows that had almost completed their theatrical runs. Then they found they could make movies just for TV. Movies do not have the cultural impact they used to but they are still a viable source of entertainment. Next cable was supposed to kill the big three networks. Cable actually started as a way to get the networks to areas that had poor reception and to provide a quality signal to UHF stations (like Fox and PBS) that had poor quality everywhere. It morphed into what we have today. But the now we have even more general networks than ever before and narrow networks beyond counting. Again the big three do not have the cultural impact that they had pre cable but they are still getting by. Now streaming is predicted to kill cable TV. The barriers to this are not access to broadband internet, or data caps or the presence of a large (mostly older) portion of the population that hasn’t a clue about streaming, it is all of the above. Here, and I suspect in many communities broadband internet is via cable. The choices are the local cable company or DSL which will not support streaming, believe me I tried. Just how is streaming going to kill cable if that is how you get broadband. As long as the wires go to all those homes, a lot of people will continue to pay for cable. All satellite TV does is provide an alternative. Dish and its competitors are structured just like cable and offer mostly the same channels. I don’t know if it is changed but we have had people here complaining bitterly as their satellite company had such a severe data cap that streaming just wasn’t possible. Streaming will have to bring in money in some way. This means either ad supported streams or subscriptions, or both. People are already complaining about the cost of subscribing to Crunchyroll, Funimation and possibly Hulu. I suspect that if your tastes run to more than just anime that combined subscriptions will rival what people are paying for cable. Especially in households with more than a single individual. The internet may take over the delivery of all forms of entertainment, cable as we know it may dwindle and die, but it will not happen overnight. And don’t be surprised if successors to the big networks are still providing content fifty years from now. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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The viral-hit show culture makes us think we've invented it, but it's just a new version of what we thought we'd gotten rid of: Since we don't all sit down on the same night to watch the same show anymore (well, guys don't, anyway  ), it's actually created MORE of a water-cooler mania for "Wow, you're a New Who fan too? You saw the Game of Thrones episode last night?" interest in having some group cult for a show that's actually still running! With new episodes that haven't aired yet!
That's not so much an indicator of the quality of the shows, it's just a sort of buried DNA trace memory of our parents' days when we all tuned in to the last episode of Roots, wondered who'd survive the big terrorist attack at the Colby's wedding, or theorized whether JR shot Laura Palmer. It says that we still want the cultural "home audience" group ethic for all tuning in on the same night, but take that away, and we end up hunkering down in a greedy, selfish, almost emotionless cave-culture of Binge-Watching episodes to scarf through them to the end of the story. (An idea Visine's eye-drop ads have either been encouraging, or nastily satirizing.) It's also taken away US TV's role that it was something weekly--It wasn't The Movies, since Hollywood movies were already showing on Sunday night, but you needed a little weekly one-hour fix of favorite characters. Think the epitaph for current US TV was written during a Disney/ABC ad for Once Upon a Time during the Oscar broadcast, showcasing all the neat expensive CGI effects: "It's like seeing a major Hollywood movie every week!" Oh whew, I thought I was just watching dumb ol' weekly television. Because cable series had to compete with movie cable or DVD/Blu and push envelopes for content, and then network series tried to grab the "serious envelope-pushing" of the cable series, series have forgotten how to be JUST TV series. They're trying for "cinematic" style, needing bigger budgets, more downbeat plots, and more overwritten season-arc plotlines. Me, OTOH, I just go to the vintage 60's-80's reruns on Netflix/Hulu to watch Lt. Columbo say "Oh, one more thing..." and solve a case in 90 minutes. 
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Maidenoftheredhand
 Posts: 2634 |
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Pretty much the only channels I regularly watch on cable are TCM & BBC America when Doctor Who is on.
I could live without BBC America if it came to that but I don't know how I would live without TCM. It's not just a channel there is a whole community around it. As it were I don't have much time for streaming anything besides anime so I invest in CR and Funimation but don't have Hulu or Netflix. Hulu has the Criterion Collection but otherwise it doesn't interest me much and Netflix not at all. They can't replace TCM. |
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FireWhale
Posts: 4 |
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Can I get some links or information on what this quote references? I would like to know more about this, especially if there is actual hard data that more anime is being produced. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Satellite-based Internet is infamously slow, even HughesNet, which comes from a company that's been launching satellites for almost as long as NASA. And Iridium has demonstrated that, while good-quality satellite data transmission is possible, it is VERY expensive. The data caps are low because launching communications satellites, especially in a business that moves as fast as the ISP business, costs a lot of money. I should point out that while we have the DISH Network in our household, our Internet is provided by Verizon. We don't use the same service that provides us with TV as we do with Internet. Few people in my neighborhood do.
Yep, and this is the case for most cable/satellite TV channels. I'm not a part of any community in particular, but I do pay attention as an observer to a few of them, like the Food Network. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9924 Location: Virginia |
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@leafy sea dragon
Outside the major urban areas, most communities granted monopoly status to a private cable provider in order to entice them to come to town. I'm not sure how it works in areas like yours. For such communities, satellite provides an alternative form of TV service to people who do not like the monopoly. Also cable is notorious for refusing to extend service to any area where the population density is not great enough. My parents lived a half mile from the nearest cable service and didn't get it until a housing development set up behind them. For people not covered by cable it is the only way to get most of the channels cable provides. Also a lot of those not covered by cable live in areas where broadcast reception is bad. The only reason we have cable for both TV and internet is that it is the only service locally which will support streaming. I used to have Verizon DSL and it would choke trying to handle Crunchyroll at the minimum quality level. A lot of people have pointed out that Verizon FIOS is the best thing available for both TV and internet. Unfortunately, Verizon has reported that they have no intention of offering this service in our valley in the foreseeable future, no reason given. |
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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SlingTV includes TCM as part of a $5/month extra package on top of the $20 basic fee. No BBCA though.
Verizon has carefully cherry-picked the areas to which it wants to deliver FiOS based on expected revenues or, in other words, wealth of the communities it serves. Last I heard Verizon has no plans to roll out FiOS to any areas not yet served. |
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Saffire
 Posts: 1256 Location: Iowa, USA |
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Maidenoftheredhand
Posts: 2634 |
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From what I understand it doesn't have a DVR function and is not supported by TCM's app. As I work all day I definitely make use of these features. 
But if it came down to it and I really needed to drop comcast to save money I would consider Slingback. I just hope the feature improves by that time (or TCM finally starts their own streaming service). |
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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I believe someone already mentioned the problem with just counting the number of series. Since the recession the number of 11-13 episode series has substantially increased, and the number of 23+ episode series has declined. Producers are now more cautious and hedge their bets with shorter initial runs. Akagami no Shirayuki-hime might well have been slotted for 24 episodes if it appeared a few years back. Instead it is being released as a "split-cour" series with installments last summer and next winter. The best measure of the amount of anime produced would require multiplying the number of episodes for each series by their lengths and summing over those figures to get a total in hours. That's a lot of work unless you have access to an online database. It might be possible using ANN's database via its API, but it would still require some programming to import the XML results and do the appropriate calculations. |
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Saffire
Posts: 1256 Location: Iowa, USA |
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It might be harder to prove that the amount has increased since 2008, but there's no time frame set on the question. I stand by my statement. |
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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I'm thinking more of the period since 2005 or so. Certainly the number of series produced has grown substantially since 2000 and enormously so since 1980. There was a big upswing in productions during the early 2000s which reached a plateau around 2005. I count 158 series on the 2006 page at Wikipedia or about the same as the number produced today. I suspect the total amount of hours of anime produced has gone down in that period, but I'm too lazy to do the math. |
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