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by chii 251 days ago
> The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other.

except that it doesn't show up as revenue. That's where the problem is - people would obviously prefer to have elite tier subs, but not be willing to pay elite tier prices for it.

4 comments

Personally, I won't pay to stream anime, but if Blu-Rays had subs as good as what dedicated fansubs can output (incl. a possibly optional more literal translation with honorifics) AND SSA subtitles somewhere on them to be used by computers, I'd actually buy them; if they aren't butchered QTEC crap (https://github.com/LightArrowsEXE/QTEC), of course.
I commend you for saying this, but this is akin to saying you would gladly pay me tomorrow for a hamburger today. It doesn’t pay the bills. Perhaps a group could assemble on Patreon or other crowdfunding to acquire rights to make their own releases if they wanted to be part of a market-based solution.

Would you be willing to crowdfund such an enterprise? It’s one thing to say you’ll put your money where your mouth is in some hypothetical future economic situation that may never arrive (as it was never funded by you or by anyone else), whereas it’s altogether another thing entirely to actually do what you say you’ll do in hopes that your investment will come good.

I understand what you're saying, but I'm still showing my disapproval via my wallet and not giving money to people who do a much worse (and/or unsuitable for fans instead of the general public) job than fans.

The amount of laughably bad upscales making BDs worse than the previous DVDs is just the cherry on top showing that they truly don't care about anyone with taste or discernment; they should put the DVD masters untouched on BD and they very rarely do so (Di Gi Charat had that).

How would you even know? Is there any single company that prices that service separately so you can tell how many customers are willing to pay for it?
it does show up. Just like star wars, the toys and figurines and sometimes it even spread into the VAs, authors and other artists adjacent to the projects.
Those are money going into the original authors/production companies etc, rather than downstream into crunchyroll.

In fact, you might even consider paying less for crunchyroll subscription, and buy more of the merch of your favourite franchises.

The more underlying question is "why does the production company care so little about the quality of the overseas version of their product?" Is it just that it's a small fraction of the JP-native revenue, or is there something else going on?
The usual thing in that case would be that crunchyroll asks the production company for money to fund all the marketing it's doing on their behalf.

In fact, the traditional model of television is that you give the show away for free and hope to make money on popularity.

If you produce music, there are multiple companies right now who sell the service of "we will upload your music to every streaming platform, so that anyone who wants to listen to it for free can do that".

I believe it does. In the comic world there were famous collaborations between visual and text artists. When the latter died the comic withered. Anime is about story telling - much harder to do well with images alone.

The real problem with all these brand killing enshittification moves is the delay until consequences manifest.