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Answerman - Business Minded

Even for what became known as the "casual pirate", those otherwise law-abiding anime fans who only watched digisubs of new series the moment they hit the Internet fan ether, and then bought them responsibly when they hit disk, because they were higher quality and had dubs.
Crunchyroll was literally a dirty word, because they were airing "pirate" subs, letting viewers gain more exposure to series.

During the disk bubble, a villain had to be found, so the industry conjured up the image that ANY fan who was watching anime in less-than-legitimate digital form was some evil hacker otaku who surfed the pirate-torrent sites, hoarding it on disk and chuckling over his cleverness at saving $29.95 for three episodes.

Sports shows are easy money in Japan, but in America they're considered a risky adaption.

And not to speak like an old-timer, but the huge number of young people I see at cons is very heartwarming.

dtm42 wrote:

And not to speak like an old-timer, but the huge number of young people I see at cons is very heartwarming.

Using this this as a comment springboard:
Going by Otakon at least, the number of attendants constantly grew year after year, boom or burst regardless. From the past near a decade of attendance, I never really felt anything different; just a constant, steady growth. I can get and probably agree with the bubble burst and second boom talk on a theoretical, macro level, but both never really... felt tangible, local to me.

Somewhere wrote:

Using this this as a comment springboard: Going by Otakon at least, the number of attendants constantly grew year after year, boom or burst regardless. From the past near a decade of attendance, I never really felt anything different; just a constant, steady growth. I can get and probably agree with the bubble burst and second boom talk on a theoretical, macro level, but both never really... felt tangible, local to me.

As a native of MD and Otakon attendee since 2004 I can get what you're saying. Though I worked for Sam Goody/Suncoast so trust me I could feel it. In fact our parent company Musicland going bankrupt was, from what I heard, one of the first big pops to the anime bubble as they were big investors in Japan. Someone correct me if I am wrong, it's been a long time since I worked for them lol.

In the early-mid 00s, there were signs - misleading ones as it turns out - that anime might be about to go mainstream in the West. Spirited Away had won an Oscar, series like Last Exile and Cowboy Bebop were doing decent numbers on TV and there were Gundam kits on toyshop shelves.

As it happened, the mainstream audiences moved onto other things - and the companies who had invested in a big mainstream boom took the pain.

They could but Funimation probably doesn't want to do an import release of it, and since Funimation doesn't want to charge Japanese-style prices, Studio Khara is holding onto 3.33 until they think they've squeezed every dime from the BD in Japan and then they'll allow Funi to sell 3.33 for "bargain basement" prices. So yeah, despite what they're saying, it's reverse importation that is holding up 3.33.

The last boom was because of shows like Pokemon, Dragonball Z, and similar titles. Not exactly risky material or independently created anime. Most anime is considered risky material in the American market because unless it's an action shounen, it's not going to get a big audience with Americans. Sports shows are easy money in Japan, but in America they're considered a risky adaption. Same with shows deemed "too Japanese" like the current massive hit Youkai Watch, or shoujo series like the myriad of magical girl series that are not streaming or licensed and can only be watched fansubbed. I think you're confusing your preference of certain anime with risky adaptions.

-Stuart Smith

But why don't the Japanese just slap english subtitles on their own products and sell them internationally? How does that change anything with their own sales to people in Japan? They can still sell licenses if they want, they can still delay them, etc but now people internationally can buy their products. Still does not make sense that they would not allow it.

How can there be too much?
If there is more than you want to watch then you can simply not watch all of it.
If there is not as much as you want to watch there is really nothing that you can do about that.

I think that it is better to have "too much" than not enough.

Crunchyroll was literally a dirty word, because they were airing "pirate" subs, letting viewers gain more exposure to series.

Actually, I think this might touch on another point of difference between how the industry (the Western part of it, at least) is now and how it was in the lead-in to the big crash last decade.

In the early-mid 00s, there were signs - misleading ones as it turns out - that anime might be about to go mainstream in the West. Spirited Away had won an Oscar, series like Last Exile and Cowboy Bebop were doing decent numbers on TV and there were Gundam kits on toyshop shelves.

As it happened, the mainstream audiences moved onto other things - and the companies who had invested in a big mainstream boom took the pain. The same thing happened in the games industry (got friends who used to work there who took the redundancy hit on this) following the release of the Wii. For a brief moment, it looked like gaming might be about to push through into huge, previously untapped markets in the 40+ age range. Then it turned out that a lot of the people who bought a Wii so they could play Wii Sports at a couple of dinner parties were never going to buy any more games for it and had moved onto the next trend already. So the third party studios who had bet on all of this went bust.

This time around, the current boom feels much more fuelled by slow-but-steady growth in an existing niche market. It's still impressive, but it's healthier and more realistic than last time.

For Blu-Rays, this is because Japan uses the ISDB-T high-definition TV format, and the only country that also uses that format with wide use of English as a language is the Philippines, with the United States and Canada using ATSC (and Bahamas, though it's not at all a large market) and all other countries with English as a primary or secondary language using DVB-T.

In other words, there has always been regional incompatibility between Japan and most of the rest of the English-speaking world, so there's no point in releasing digital home video to hopefully sell to a region that most people wouldn't be able to use.

CN Real

I don't think we will ever see anything like Pokémon at the peak of its popularity ever again (the anime, I mean--the video games continue to fly off the shelves)
For kids watching animation on TV (I'd say there was a burst with western animation around 2008-9 too, and only now is it recovering with shows like Adventure Time and Phineas and Ferb), I would say it was High School Musical. That came down like a thunderbolt, completely unexpected. All of a sudden, kids considered animated TV as immature, and Disney and Nickelodeon were pumping out kids' sitcoms about tweens as fast as they could make them with Cartoon Network doing CN Real.
That's what can strike a rising trend hardest: When something else comes along and steals its audience away.

...For Blu-Rays, this is because Japan uses the ISDB-T high-definition TV format, and the only country that also uses that format with wide use of English as a language is the Philippines, with the United States and Canada using ATSC (and Bahamas, though it's not at all a large market) and all other countries with English as a primary or secondary language using DVB-T.

So HD formats are interchangeable? What's the point of having different formats then? What's the difference between them anyway? And if Blu-Rays don't have region locks, why do DVDs do?

So HD formats are interchangeable? What's the point of having different formats then? What's the difference between them anyway? And if Blu-Rays don't have region locks, why do DVDs do?