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Anime: The Blu-ray problem.

I don't see this as a big concern. None of the other anime released so far on Blu Ray have done this, so there definitely isn't an overall trend in that direction.

However with Bluray that distinction is gone, US released Blurays will play in Japanese Bluray players with ease and vice versa, the barrier is down... Did the BDA ever even think to take this into consideration when they designed Bluray region codes?

It's certainly a concern. I love anime on Blu, but it started trending toward dub only I'd be pretty pissed. I don't listen to dubs. But yes, the fact that North America and Japan share region encoding was certainly a strange choice. On one hand it's great for cusumers (especially those who have always imported new and rare Japan releases) but for studios it just seems to be a giant hassle of coordiating releases to minimize reverse importation.

Ranma87 wrote:

However with Bluray that distinction is gone, US released Blurays will play in Japanese Bluray players with ease and vice versa, the barrier is down... Did the BDA ever even think to take this into consideration when they designed Bluray region codes?

Note that Japan and Europe fall within the same DVD region, and that this seemingly advantageous state of affairs has not provided any noticeable benefits in our case. The occasional Japanese DVD release includes English subtitles —such as Pale Cocoon amongst others— but matters such as price and importation fees still constitute an effective barrier.

Considering that standard European and American prices are generally lower than Japanese ones, the ineffectiveness of Europe being in the same DVD region as Japan ought to be indicative of the same being the case for America regarding Blu-ray.

I don't see the concern if Japan reverse import anime. The Japanese DVD are more expensive and also it turns out they like our dubalso. That could be another reason why we're seeing reverse import. Bandai wants to do a "dub only" Blu-Ray/DVD thing. If they do that, then people in USA will get mad and wants to watch the fansubs and that's not what we want, is it? Just let the Japanese fan do what they want, buy it on their DVD or import ours. They get both benefits like it's cheaper and they get to adore our English dub, and also our English dub anime has been used to help the Japanese learn English. So I don't see the problem. It's a win-win situation for Japan and USA.

mdo7 wrote:

I don't see the concern if Japan reverse import anime. The Japanese DVD are more expensive and also it turns out they like our dubalso. That could be another reason why we're seeing reverse import. Bandai wants to do a "dub only" Blu-Ray/DVD thing. If they do that, then people in USA will get mad and wants to watch the fansubs and that's not what we want, is it? Just let the Japanese fan do what they want, buy it on their DVD or import ours. They get both benefits like it's cheaper and they get to adore our English dub, and also our English dub anime has been used to help the Japanese learn English. So I don't see the problem. It's a win-win situation for Japan and USA.

The issue is that if they're not spending 4000 yen on Japanese DVDs which have only 2-3 (possibly 4) episodes, then the studios and distribution companies lose a lot of revenue. They make far more money off of selling expensive DVDs in Japan than they do with licensing it off, if it's a good and well-liked anime. But we do have plenty of shows whose sales were barely triple digits, so a licensing cost might be beneficial there.

In the days of DVD only, one of the reasons why region codes were set up (with different region codes for the U.S. and Japan) was to discourage importation into Japan that would subvert internal revenue from foreign made movies (think Hollywood blockbusters). The barrier between Europe and Japan was already established with the NTSC/PAL difference. It really worked in favor for the U.S. (since they orchestrated the region coding system in the first place) for several reasons:
1) Revenue from licensing costs of American films substitute for the loss of international distribution due to the region barrier.
2) The fact that DVD prices in Japan are higher, without region codes retailers in Japan would suffer, even with the costs of importing western films incurred by individual consumers. But this really has no effect on U.S. sales.
3) Think of the message garnered from assigning U.S. (and Canada) #1 and Japan #2?

None of these objectives pertain directly to the importation of DVD from Japan to the U.S. so how is removing this barrier (with the onset of BluRay) a problem in terms of Japan -> U.S. importation?