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INTEREST: Kadokawa Producer: Physical Sales Are Still Important in Anime Industry

It's weird how ignorant people are in this comment section, you guys have such simple minds, and no idea on how things work in the anime industry, so stop trying to act like specialist.
"Oh they still live in the past", that's just dumb for so many reasons, people treat the producer as an amateur, the guys WORKS in the industry, HE KNOWS how thing works and how things operate, and what gives money or what doesn't, people who think he live in the past because he think that physical copies are important are just ignoring the fact that they actually ARE important and give the industry MONEY.
Also the anime's production doesn't end after the TV airing, even after the episode aired, the staff still has to work on the same episode after finishing the series, because the busy TV schedule means making a lot of mistakes in the production, so usually the TV version is like a preview of what the serie should be, but the finished product comes after that, they usually fix animation mistakes or some incoherences, and all that require time and effort, which means that it cost money and the only way to have that money back is by releasing the physical copies because all anime streaming website all stream the TV version, and after the bluray is released most people have already watched the TV series on TV or a streaming website and probably won't bother streaming it again just because it's a newer version but what they will do is buying merchandise including the blu ray version. This is one of the reasons that make it important but there are more that I don't know about.

Indeed, when will Japan get with the times and go digital only like us enlightened Americans?

*randomly loses entire collection because a service shuts down or loses the license*

Whoops.

Considering how rushed the animation is for TV anime and how we literally have incomplete endings sometimes, and how streaming licenses regularly expire, it's a good thing we still have disc sales and that those still bring in are large per-unit profit. Particularly for niche shows with smaller audiences, relying purely on streaming for the masses isn't enough (CR had already stated that fund distribution back to licensors is function of viewership), hence the need for all kinds of other revenue sources from merchandise to home video.

With anime having revised content of varying degrees on disc releases, I think people who solely rely on streaming/TV broadcasts are missing out.

Tanaka-sensei "said that even titles that fail to create a buzz in Japan have sometimes become very successful overseas, and many titles have turned out well from the viewpoint of production committees." While Tanaka-sensei listing at least 2 examples would help, it might be a business/legal reason barring him from doing that.

The problem is exactly that a lot of people still think that disc sales ARE the most important thing, or even the only important thing. And, in my experience, a lot of the people making this argument come at it from the angle of, "since streaming doesn't matter, I have no personal responsibility to stream shows on a legal platform. I bought that one Japanese DVD set 10 years ago, so I'm the real fan supporting the shows I like at the source!"

What's wrong with that? I've spent thousands of dollars importing disks from Japan of my favorite shows. I spent over 1000 for all of Sket Dance alone, and assuming all your CR money goes directly to that show, which it doesn't, it would take someone watching it for 15 years straight to spend that much,which probably isn't possible as the license would be pulled before that. For a 1 cour show, it'd only be about 360 dollars, which is a more manageable 4.5 years, but still.

As an aside, when companies say disk sales are less important than they were, they also mean things like merchandise, music, and events also bring in money. If stuff like Love Live and UtaPri had abyssmal disk sales, Im sure music and event sales would make them profitable franchises still, not so much the streaming I would wager.

And what does that last part have anything to do with turning profit from a show? You're talking oranges while people are discussing apples.

This notion that Japan is 'backwards' for having a healthy physical industry in books, music, games, and TV seems like the mindset a CEO looking to control distribution outlets would think, not a consumer who wants options.

But Japan doesn't have a healthy physical media industry just like most other major media consuming countries don't these days. Hence, a producer claiming that physical media is the sole backbone of the industry, while statistics for 2016 clearly show that streaming was over 25% of industry revenue while physical media was 11%... sounds kind of like someone is living in the past a little.

All I am seeing is a 2016 report with graphs up to 2015, so can you point to, and specifically mention which data/number did you get the 25% of the industry revenue in 2016 is from streaming coming from?

But Japan doesn't have a healthy physical media industry just like most other major media consuming countries don't these days. Hence, a producer claiming that physical media is the sole backbone of the industry, while statistics for 2016 clearly show that streaming was over 25% of industry revenue while physical media was 11%... sounds kind of like someone is living in the past a little.