I went to our regional Anime/Manga conference with my kids last month.
One of the more interesting panel discussions was with an American voice actress. The economics for such a profession are discouraging of course, and she couldn't hold back the opinion that watching anime from the net was "stealing".
But you look around the audience and clearly the great majority of the fans are too young to have real jobs. Still, many of these young people have put untold hours of work into making these incredible costumes.
Then you go to the vendors (or anywhere) to look at a licensed DVD for a season or two of a popular anime: $60 !
1. It's outrageously priced.
And the hardcore fans don't even like the product as much as the "fan subs" available online. E.g.:
2. It's usually overdubbed instead of subtitled.
3. Often it's edited down for more commercial slots for US cable TV.
4. Where there are subtitles for the opening and ending songs they don't have phonetic Japanese (romaji) or karaoke effects (words exploding into pink flowers are hugely important to a certain set of customers).
5. The translation is often not accurate, all the Japanese idiosyncracies are ironed out to make completely bland English. (Was said to be usually at the insistence of the Japanese studio).
EDIT: Of course I forgot the most important parts:
6. The video quality of the fansubs is often much better at 720p.
7. The fansubs are often more available, sometimes within hours of something appearing on TV in .jp. Official DVDs may drag out for years of on-again off-again rumors.
8. The fansubs of course have no DRM. They're just files that play on your computer and can be shared among fans. (Though sometimes they require codec downloads from sketchy looking sites).
The way I've had it explained to me is that the pricing is high because the Japanese market will bear it, and so lowering the prices on the Japanese market would hurt profits. When they've experimented with selling U.S. DVDs cheaper, Japanese fans have imported them at the lower price, killing sales of the more profitable Japanese region version. One way they've attempted to mitigate this is to make the DVDs unattractive to Japanese buyers using the methods you describe such as having dubbed audio with no Japanese sound option, or delaying the release.
edit: the japanese market's willingness to pay high media prices is explained on page 2 of the article
This is part of a general pattern where producers actively choose the level of piracy that maximises their profits, then complain about it in the hope of further increasing profits via politics and social engineering.
Precisely. When there are multiple fansub groups competing to produce the highest quality release, including subtitles, translator notes, video encoding and MKV metadata, subtitle timing and placement, the bar gets set higher for official licensed distributions.
Some fansub groups go so far as to provide signage overlays that move and scale as the scene itself moves. It's so subtle sometimes that I only notice it after the fact.
One idea I had was for there to be a way for fansub groups to distribute their translations in such a way as to layer on top of a licensed distribution. So you'd get the DVD/BlueRay for a particular Anime, and then layer on top of it your favorite fansub group's translations and translator notes, and somehow they'd line up.
This would require the licensed distribution to provide the original audio track and scene timing to match the original version, of course. US pricing and in some cases even US availability are another issue.
> So you'd get the DVD/BlueRay for a particular Anime, and then layer on top of it your favorite fansub group's translations and translator notes, and somehow they'd line up.
That's a really cool idea.
But how does this represent an improvement over what's available now via torrent? I can't help but be skeptical about a plan that involves riding on top of a DVD that's already priced out of the market by the studios.
How about just an improvement over the subbing tools? Many of them are simply immature software. Can you fan-source it? Make it collaborative, interactive? Link it with Japanese lessons or a native speaker somehow?
There are whole conference centers filling up on a regular basis with teenagers who, out of love for this aesthetic, have taught themselves to sew. There has got to be a business model there for someone!
Right now it's being won by the guy who lugs cardboard boxes of $40 t-shirts from state to state in his van.
> sometimes they require codec downloads from sketchy looking sites
I'm not sure where you got this idea from, but it is patently false. Although the recommended software for playing anime fansubs is Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which is open source[0], I have had no issues using MPlayer either. And as of 2.0, VLC is supposed to have the requisite subtitle support as well.
It's been a few years since I went spelunking in the anime torrents, perhaps things have changed. But back then, for 32 bit Windows, it was definitely the case that the occasional anime would require an oddball codec. Usually it would be open source but still not be practical to build yourself (if you wanted to watch any anime that evening too).
I'm not sure where you got your anime from, but I've been watching fansubs for the last 10 years. On Windows, VLC has always worked for hardsubbed anime. Once softsubbed anime started coming out, there were some cases in which the font styling wouldn't work correctly, but then you could just use Media Player Classic Home Cinema. As for codec packs, I know some people have recommended installing the CCCP[0], as it includes MPCHC along with some other stuff, but MPCHC by itself has always worked for me.
Perhaps you weren't using a reliable website. I've definitely heard of sites out there that try to trick you into installing spyware by saying it's a codec. I always used torrents to download releases listed on AniDB (I searched using the CRC checksums, which anime fansub groups include in the filenames), so I entirely avoided that problem.
> Usually it would be open source but still not be practical to build yourself (if you wanted to watch any anime that evening too).
As for this, I've never seen any codecs that you had to build yourself, particularly on Windows, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
One of the more interesting panel discussions was with an American voice actress. The economics for such a profession are discouraging of course, and she couldn't hold back the opinion that watching anime from the net was "stealing".
But you look around the audience and clearly the great majority of the fans are too young to have real jobs. Still, many of these young people have put untold hours of work into making these incredible costumes.
Then you go to the vendors (or anywhere) to look at a licensed DVD for a season or two of a popular anime: $60 !
1. It's outrageously priced.
And the hardcore fans don't even like the product as much as the "fan subs" available online. E.g.:
2. It's usually overdubbed instead of subtitled.
3. Often it's edited down for more commercial slots for US cable TV.
4. Where there are subtitles for the opening and ending songs they don't have phonetic Japanese (romaji) or karaoke effects (words exploding into pink flowers are hugely important to a certain set of customers).
5. The translation is often not accurate, all the Japanese idiosyncracies are ironed out to make completely bland English. (Was said to be usually at the insistence of the Japanese studio).
EDIT: Of course I forgot the most important parts:
6. The video quality of the fansubs is often much better at 720p.
7. The fansubs are often more available, sometimes within hours of something appearing on TV in .jp. Official DVDs may drag out for years of on-again off-again rumors.
8. The fansubs of course have no DRM. They're just files that play on your computer and can be shared among fans. (Though sometimes they require codec downloads from sketchy looking sites).