Forum - View topicChicks On Anime - Copyright Enforcement
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6874 Location: Kazune City |
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Also, it's a mostly-accepted piece of anime history that overseas popularity and licensing basically saved the anime industry from tanking in the late 90s. Guess what was behind that? English dubs of shows like Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, Pokemon, Sailor Moon, and DBZ. I can't stand this "dubs ruin anime just by existing" attitude that seeks to drive things back into the days of separate dub/sub VHS releases. I'm sure you would've enjoyed paying $5 more per tape for subtitled versions just to avoid the evil taint of the dubs. Once things reach the boxed set stage, there's practically no difference in price (especially at TRSI sale prices) between sub-only and dual-language releases. That's why I say it is selfish to want to deprive other people of a language option they enjoy just so you can save an amount equivalent to a Burger King value meal. And many releases these days are coming out sub-only -- are you buying those? Oh wait, sub-only R1 releases are just "glorified fansubs that don't provide any value because they somehow have equivalent translation to the fansubs despite being translated by professionals, and have ocular-carcinogenic subtitles." 
It's like the companies are between a rock and a hard place these days. [speculative ranting, skip if you want]spoiler[If they dub an anime, they get all these complaints about "omg that ruins the anime and makes anime more expensive even though it's 1/2 the price they pay in Japan." And if they do sub-only, they get the "anime itself is worthless, I don't want to buy glorified fansubs, I don't want to watch subbed anime even though I already enjoyed this show fansubbed." What should they do, download the fansubs, burn them to DVD, and sell those? After all, that would make R1 releases actual fansubs instead of "glorified" ones. It would appease the raving dub haters by not including a dub, it would appease the "yellow subtitles are boring and ugly" crowd, and it would appease the "fansub translations are so much better than butchered localized Westernized Americanized subs" crowd. Sure, the DVDs would have to be completely hardsubbed because DVD technology can't handle softsubbing for karaoke and special text effects. But that's the kind of tradeoff that has to be made. After all, if there's no dub, why would you need to turn the subtitles off? And besides, people watched 100% hardsubbed fansubs until late 2005, they can handle it.][/rant]
Do you watch fansubs? If so, why does it matter how long something takes to come out in the US? You've already seen the show. In the end, there has to be a point where we as fans have to compromise and meet the companies halfway to ensure the continued |
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iindigo
 Posts: 73 |
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I actually wouldn't mind it at all if anime producers extended an olive branch towards fansub groups and offered them the job of subbing and distributing anime in foreign markets. If nothing else because fansubbers realize the need to deliver high-quality, uncrippled downloads (especially when it's being paid for) whereas the anime distribution companies think they can just throw up a sub-youtube quality stream and highly incompatible Windows Media files and call it a day.
EDIT: It could be even better if they let multiple groups sub each title, since it would then induce competition, which would in turn pump up quality and provide the consumer with a plethora of choices. Don't like xxgroup's translation style or prefer your subs more plain/fancy/whathaveyou? No problem, since there'd be several sources to pick from. It wouldn't be like now when a bad DVD release of a series is released and everybody is stuck with it unless they want to do without. Last edited by iindigo on Fri May 08, 2009 2:40 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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krelyan
Posts: 173 Location: Utah |
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It was you that was arguing that bandwidth costs were trivial, yet DVD costs are outrageous. Now to use your own condescending tone, what you didn't note was that 51% of the costs are estimated to be bandwidth-related while only 36% is content licensing. The $1 million cost figure was bandwidth alone ("Bandwidth accounts for about 51% of expenses -- with a run rate of $1 million per day"). And what was the analysts suggestion for them to turn a profit? "In our view, the issue for YouTube going forward is to increase the percentage of its videos that can be monetized (likely through more deals with content companies) and to drive more advertiser demand through standardization of ad formats and improved ad effectiveness."
It's cheaper than physical distribution, but its not a night and day difference. As of 2003, DVDs cost about $1000 to master and about $0.70 to replicate (Source), and of course you still have to factor in shipping to retailers. Still peanuts compared to licensing (and even dubbing). |
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MisterH
Posts: 30 |
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Sub-only can hardly be expected to recoup it's costs as well as dual audio versions, so I'd say that'd be the reasoning behind that. I only question the reasoning behind not also releasing small batches of cheaper discs that don't pass on costs of dubbing.
Personally, I never said I want the dual audio version to disappear. I just don't want to pay for (expensive) extras that I don't need. |
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PetrifiedJello
Posts: 3782 |
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LRH, you have consistently confused the difference between ones skills and the cost of content. In addition, you have continued to ignore the fact licensing fees takes more away from artists than applies to them. Yes, we get the fact this is some compensation to keep things going, but it is not the only one. As long as contracts prevent studios, producers, and other parties from trying new models, control remains in the hands of distributors. As I've said, I get their stance. They pay for these fees, then try to recoup what they paid. But they're not needed anymore. Digital distribution can reach millions faster than the licensing model/DVD distribution in place. This now forces studios (and other industries) to wake up and realize there needs to be changes such that monies are paid. I'm sorry you continue to confuse the two, but it's pretty difficult to address your position when you refuse (adamantly, I admit) to educate yourself. If nothing I have said to this point will help you understand, I must inquire why you feel the need to keep hitting the hornet's nest with your "help the starving artist!" stick. Ferris wheels are fun. But after a while, going in circles gets boring. Switch to a roller coaster. Much more exciting. Unless, that is, you're afraid to change. |
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edzieba
Posts: 704 |
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Let's look ad bandwidth costs. Using Amazon's S3 storage service to serve content, and assuming top-tier pricing:
12 cents a month for storage per GB, 10 cents for GB transfered. Let's further assume these are nice, high-bitrate, HD files. 1GB per episode isn't out of the question (350mb is 'acceptable' but 1gb hops you above the grain threshhold in almsot every occurrence). That's 10 cents per episode viewed (or downloaded, you can use the same file for each with no problems and existing software), plus 12 cents for each episode stored a month (irrespective of downloads). 12/1000 downloaders quickly makes this almost irrelevent, so for the sake of ease of calculation, we'll skip it. Now, I'm going to grab the numbers from TT for the first episode of FMA. Unfortunately due to C&D dropping the tracker stats from 2 of the top 3 sub groups, I'll extrapolate from Elcipse's stats: (42576+16224) * 3 = 176400 downloads per episode. The first episode came out almost exactly one month ago,so we'll take that as our monthly download rate (A HUGE OVERESTIMATION, downloads will drop off within a few days to a week). At 10 cents per download makes a total cost of 17 and a half thousand dollars. Now for DVDs. Assume we live in Magical Faerie Pixie Land, where everybody buys DVDs instead of watching TV. To press the same number of DVDs, would cost the mastering cost plus the cost per disc. $1000 + 176400*0.7 = $124,480. That's AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more than downloads. And the downloads would be of massively higher quality. BD mastering and pressing costs are quite a lot higher than that. Not to mention possible dubbing costs. Now, downloads are not a replacement for DVDs in every case. I personally would be happy to just have the file on a HDD, or burn it to a regular (non video) DVD and print my own case insert. But I can see the appeal of having it done for you. I'd personally be perfectly happy to pay 20 cents per episode for a high quality download. That's 100% profit. Assuming costs to encode and sub are about $2500 (a huge, huge overestimation, but let;s assume this covers English, French, Chinese, German, Spanish, etc), that's still Fifteen thousand dollars per episode pure profit. If done by the license holders and available worldwide, there aren't even any license fees to pay. I'll be first to admit these are ballpark, back-of-the-napkin figures at best, but I can't think of anyone who'd object that $0.20 is an unreasonable cost for a high-quality, unfettered and subbed episode, available at airtime. And the license holders wouldn't even have to pay the TV stations to run it, so 'region bleed' into Japan would simply be MORE profit. But as current copyright law stands, this would be pretty difficult to pull off. What seems immediately obvious is not the everyone should kowtow mindlessly to an established but frankly idiotic system, but forge a new system, and change any legislation to reflect that. That's how law evolves, and always has evolved. We're simply in a time where change has occured faster than ever before, and the legal system has been too slow to react (and retarded further by publishers and distributors who've seen the demise of their current business model, and decided foolishly that they can stop change rather than try to embrace it). The harder and longer the outmoded system is clung to, the harder it will be to create a new one that people will use. And this applies to ALL forms of media distribution, not just anime. |
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PetrifiedJello
Posts: 3782 |
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You need to work on this. 
I didn't miss this at all, but this also comes with the territory. A site that gets big is going to suffer increased costs. YouTube's solely reliant on ad revenue, so my original statement against this stands. But what you (and others) forget to realize, that (if copyright crap was removed) these costs wouldn't be as strenuous on one site because many more would offset it by allowing copies on their site. There's a reason why YouTube is so popular. There aren't many other sites out there like it, especially when Google's other business models are offsetting YouTube's costs. Oh, and you want to see just how demanding the distribution companies are? Go read the latest news of what they're trying to do to Hulu now. Damn, even within their own world, they're screwing themselves over by restricting user access. And we all know what happens when a company pisses off its customers. In this case, however, Hulu will be blamed. Not the distributors who are forcing Hulu to make the change. It's just a matter of time before Hulu closes its website, because the last time I checked, it doesn't have a search engine company. |
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bayoab
Posts: 831 |
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Because you have to master, QC, press, print, etc a new DVD and you aren't going to sell a lot of them. It is basically burning money since you won't have a large enough print run and no B&M store is going to carry it. Also, the difference in price is almost trivial on sale (~$2.50 at most).
(Just for a random example for why these "sell it cheap" numbers never really work out that way... There was a volume of Nana that was sold for <1000 yen. The total money that exchanged hands on that volume was almost the same as the other volumes which sold for 35x more.) Also note the cost of pressing 5000 DVDs at a cost of ~.5/DVD (the cost these days.) is $1000+5000*.5 = $3500. You can turn around and sell these for $5 profit each and make $25000. (I love how people keep throwing around the $50 figure as if the company actually sees more than 33% of that.) |
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kefkaownsall
 Posts: 189 |
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While on the subject of crappy fansubs I was watching a K-On fansub which didn't have karaoke despite being a music anime. Yet the fansub was way overblown with other effects. Big font and text on the wall=not good. Also how do you feel about proxy servers?
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edzieba
Posts: 704 |
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FaytLein
 Posts: 1260 Location: Williamsburg, VA |
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See, here is my thought process, so if I am making some horrible miscalculation, please let me know. Apple offers a song for 10 cents. Now, they have 100,000 downloads, which would bring in more money than if it was 1.39 with half the downloads. I understand that. But how did Apple acquire the song? Now, if they are making arrangements with every single artist for that price, then that is by the artists decision to sell at that low price, not Apple determining the value for them. So, in order to sell something at .10 Apple would have to buy it at a level that they could sell it at that price in order for them to make a profit on, in order for them to maintain their service. Now, lets say that in fact that out of that 10 cents...the artist makes 7 cents out of that. Again, as long as the artist is willing to let it go at that price, it would mean he would value it at seven cents because it would be profitable to him, covering his costs and so on. So then out of that seven cents, he is only really regrouping 5 cents out of the deal, which would be his profit for creating his work. So, if his song was downloaded say, 50,000 times in a week, it would mean his take home would be 2,500 which is pretty darn spiffy if you ask me. And lets say it took him a month to complete a CD's worth of work, that would be equivalent to about a 15 dollar an hour job, and while he would have to pay taxes and the like, is still possibly making EVEN MORE money by each successive week! Color me impressed! I kind of feel even more stupid than usual running these numbers and seeing the results. How could I possibly say no to an attractive system like this? Well, first of all, unless this single person is a master at virtually all aspects of creation from start to finish, the cost will never realistically drop to that level, again, unless those involved agree to sell their services for such a low price. Now, of course, with computers you can pretty much accomplish much more than what you could, even 10 years ago, costs couldn't not have plummeted to virtually free even with the aid of computers. And of course, if the artist has one or more collaborators, profitability drops even more, since all those involved will want to be compensated for the effort that went into creation. Secondly, lets say for example that the creator is a lone person, and gets every cent of what is coming to him right? He's making money, his fans are happy, all is right with the world. But then, lets say that one of his fans takes his songs, and puts them up, free of charge and suddenly, all those people who were buying, even at the low,low price of 10 cents, start flocking to the free site, and his weekly returns slowly begin to dwindle. He takes another month, creates another CD's worth of songs, and this time, in order to maintain the standard of living pre-free release, raises his price say, another two cents, just to try to regain his losses. His fans take his work, take it to the free site, and his downloads continue to fall. Eventually, he decides its not worth it anymore and stops producing, and goes out and gets a real job, which people should do anyway because he was a complete and total jerk to think that he might be able to make a living at something and possibly make more money than the people who bought his music have. Because greed totally sucks man. Totally. |
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MisterH
Posts: 30 |
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If whatever costs associated with doing so were greater than any hypothetical profits that might be had, then granted it wouldn't be worth it.
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chrisc1978
 Posts: 364 |
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Why is everyone talking about music??? I guess I am on the wrong website, I thought it was for anime?
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edzieba
Posts: 704 |
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FaytLein
Posts: 1260 Location: Williamsburg, VA |
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Now then, if by recording on that $1000 computer is going to equal what we get on CDs currently, then the cost has dropped since then, but still, you have to sell at a price to offset the price of the computer. |
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