Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Don't DVDs On Demand Work For Anime?
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2579 Location: Germany |
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I am willing to say that DVDs On Demand don´t even work for films. There is no money in any of this and everyone can burn an print their own packaging easily.
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2246 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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The original motivation for print-on-demand was because of the cost of creating stamp masters. Although I'm a little bit out of date, it's like in the range of $250 a layer or so these days, right?
All the other costs, like the authoring, the subtitling, the package design, etc, aren't saved by going print-on-demand, and the per-disc cost is higher too. You can do the math, and the range where using print-on-demand is cheaper than using a real pressed disc is something like 0-250 copies.... but the savings is maybe 10% of the overall production cost, and that's not even counting license costs! If you keep doing the math, you'll see that to cover the other production costs at only ~250 sales you'll have to price the set fairly high. So you end up with a basically untenable business model: Even if print-on-demand would save you money at your expected sales numbers, your overall revenue for a series isn't going to justify putting it out. The ONLY situation where I could see it being useful is where a publishing company, for some contractual reason, has no choice but to put out a series. In that case they pay as little as possible for all aspects of production. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5925 Location: Virginia, United States |
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When playing from an external hard drive, some TV's don't show the sub-titles, while others do. Sometimes there are problems in timing, where the sub-titles don't match the spoken words, I have had a lot of success, but even then you tend to get a lot of artifacts. I hope you are right and things get better. |
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TheAncientOne
 Posts: 1892 Location: USA (mid-south) |
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While that is certainly true now, apparently that wasn't the case once upon a time. AFAIK, Harmony Gold's licenses for the series that made up Robotech and Voyager Entertainment's license for Space Battleship Yamato series are eternal. No doubt most of the reason for this was that home video was in its infancy, and little long term value was seen in these series by the companies that held the original copyright. |
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PMDR
Posts: 142 |
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The appeal of burned discs to a company like Warner is simple: they have a huge library of titles. If they want to sell these titles to customers, they have a choice of doing it the traditional way, which is proper mastering and production, packaging, kitting as needed, shipping the final product to huge retailers hoping for shelf space and no returns, or risk of their films ending up in the $5 bargain bins. If they make a disc nobody wants to sell, they could end up with just tons of the things sitting in a warehouse waiting to be remaindered or written off entirely. There is a lot of risk to making disc like that if the demand is unclear.
So the idea of making it on demand means you don't have to do a print run of 50,000 discs and hope they don't end up sitting in a warehouse, or 100,000 copies for Walmart. All losses from unsold discs are erased. You don't end up remaindering 10,000 copies to Big Lots or Ollie's, or just dumping them in a landfill. From a manufacturing and warehousing standpoint, there are lot of reasons make-on-demand works. But there are lots of reasons it does not work. For me, I am not overly concerned about fancy menus and slipcases when it is a choice between seeing the show at all versus not seeing it, ever. This is why a lot of us used to tolerate 4th gen VHS copies: it was that or nothing. BUT The issue of disc quality and longevity has also been touched on and this is a Real Thing (TM). I've got boxes full of burned CD-Rs which have delaminated and fallen apart, and this from supposed superior name brands like Verbatim. Many other cheap brands of discs are made in factories where doing it cheaply matters more than quality. There are also fraudsters who copy the look and feel of a better disc but supply a fake dirtbag quality disc. These people have even been known to fool buyers from big chain stores and online retailer, so you never really know if you're buying a real Ritek disc or a fake. As a result, I don't trust any burned disc for anything I absolutely have to keep. Luckily the need for burning things like data backups has decreased as the cost of hard drives has made backing up to a second drive the far more economical and faster option. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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I have a DLNA server running and use that sometimes with my TV or smart phone. In general I find modern commercial devices only have problems with 10-bit H.264 and ASS subtitles. My 3-4 year-old LG TV will often display the subtitling commands (location, color, styles, etc.) along with the subtitle texts themselves. I don't think I have anything in H.265 yet, so I can't speak to that. Matroska (.MKV) now seems pretty widely supported, though some Sony equipment only likes MP4 and older formats like AVI. MXPlayer for Android phones is a pretty full-featured player, on a par with mplayer for computers. These days I use mplayer's descendant mpv; that seems to play anything including H.265. I run Linux, but there are mpv builds for Windows as well. If I were going to buy a download-to-disc image, I'd want an .iso disk image rather than a physical disk. Most software can play disk images directly, and you'd have a backup in case a physical disk goes south. Of course, no distributor would give me an .iso image even though they know that I can rip any DVD to the equivalent image with easily available software. |
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GVman
 Posts: 730 |
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[quote="TarsTarkas"]
Well, you're in luck, because Discotek put it out on professionally-pressed DVDs, in case you weren't aware. |
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Ali07
 Posts: 3333 Location: Victoria, Australia |
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I'm in the exact same boat. I'll leave series I deem forgettable up in the cloud, but ones I'll re-watch are the ones I'll be buying. Media Blasters has some series I'd like to own, but some of them were released on DVD-R, so I won't be owning them. They do have the upcoming My Wife is the Student Council President release...and I'm hoping that they release that one on BD (as, apparently, their BD releases aren't BD-Rs). |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4447 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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and the most important thing why it dont work is that most people dont even know them. which was the case when manga ent created a website called sputnik 7 so people can see their least popular series online and for free back in the late 90's/early 2000's. a couple of them i watched over and over on that site were Red Hawk and the Orguss 02 OVAs . can be surprised that companies are instead to stream their series online first then release them on DVD afterwards. doing it the vice versa no longer makes sense i'm afraid. |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2034 |
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I have a few MOD DVDs, mostly from Warner Archive, and a couple from Nickelodeon. The discs themselves turned out fine, I have no problems with them. The picture quality is no different than traditionally pressed discs.
BD-R is really difficult to do though. Even Warner Archive's Blu-rays are traditionally pressed (just in limited quantities, and sold exclusively online), same with Media Blasters. Nickelodeon has released some discs this way though. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Yes, I've noticed that most of the "Eww, they'll use cheap DVD-R's from Staples, and they'll all melt in your player!" fearmongering against the MOD model is from those who've never actually bought a studio Archive disk. I've got a few from Warner and MGM, and they're good professional traditionally-pressed quality. The movies were even remastered in widescreen and looked better than the VHS's I'd had for years up to that point, so the studio clearly intended them to be "official" releases, just with a more foolproof sales model. (And which, to neurotic-paranoid Warner, means selling any old movie on disk that isn't Batman, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, or Seven/GoodFellas.) Like you said, it's only the brief 90's cable-network rush, when Nick and History Channel jumped on the DVD craze to give viewers quick copies of episodes, that we got rushed backroom DVD-R disks. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I was originally going to bring these up, but I did actually see one before, I believe at a Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster did all sorts of weird experimental stuff in the 90's and 00's (like that Pokémon Snap printer that none of the Blockbuster Video people understood, and thus I was never able to get my photos printed), and the draw was that you'd get movies for cheap as you wait for the machine to put the data on the disk. I never used it, so I don't really know what happened to it.
I think the issue here is the lack of tolerance and forgiveness. I don't know much about how anime fans often treat their home video releases, but I have been parts of other fandoms notorious for their pickiness, and preference of insults over constructive criticism is only one problem of many, including lifelong boycotts or death threats over what were clearly mistakes or unavoidable issues in production, said flaws becoming excuses to pirate the material instead of buying it, or expecting the industry to behave in a particular way and then ranting and complaining when they don't. In these cases, they aren't of any help, and they're actively refusing to help. |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5925 Location: Virginia, United States |
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So what are MOD discs?
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14886 |
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Like how those Brits in Clockwork Orange watch their films |
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Ali07
Posts: 3333 Location: Victoria, Australia |
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Sounds to me you're describing a bunch of anime fans I've seen posting online... 
AoA related threads bring some out. |
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