Everybody Loves Jerome

britguy said:
Not quite sure I understand the logic in this.....
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Personally, I see no value in digital-only. I sure as hell won't be paying for a digital download of anime that will be objectively inferior to a "fansub".
I'll happily pay for blurays that are inferior to a "fansub", because there's a tangible product. But if the only choices are download a "fansub" or buy a digital download which makes no effort to embrace the technologies "fansubbers" use, and will probably be encased in some incredibly awkward DRM, it's an easy decision for me.
 
britguy said:
Erm, well would it? I mean, have you seen how many licenses Crunchyroll got this season. Hypothetically speaking, just because Manga/Animatsu go out of business does not mean anime dies, just your preferred option of consuming anime might take a hit (buying UK DVDs/BDs from them specifically). If Manga went out of business, Crunchyroll would still be buying licenses as long as their subscriber numbers warrant it.
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They are an American company who seems to not give two shits about the U.K. As the Eccentic family situation showed also I checked today and we still DONT have kiss him not me 5 weeks after the end of the season. And CR don't mind giving us S3 of shows (YowaPedal) with no legal way of seeing 1/2.
 
britguy said:
Im sure if physical media disappears then there will always be a "buy to own digitally" like amazon video, itunes etc, else where will the companies get their money other than through subscriptions. I don't advocate piracy tbh
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But you don't actually "buy to "own" with those kinds of service.
 
britguy said:
Erm, well would it? I mean, have you seen how many licenses Crunchyroll got this season. Hypothetically speaking, just because Manga/Animatsu go out of business does not mean anime dies, just your preferred option of consuming anime might take a hit (buying UK DVDs/BDs from them specifically). If Manga went out of business, Crunchyroll would still be buying licenses as long as their subscriber numbers warrant it.
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Which would mean most TBS anime would be inaccessible to the UK. 3 of 22 TBS anime on CR are available in the UK. A further 8 are available on DVD/bluray.
 
britguy said:
Im sure if physical media disappears then there will always be a "buy to own digitally" like amazon video, itunes etc, else where will the companies get their money other than through subscriptions. I don't advocate piracy tbh
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Amazon once pulled people's copies of "1984" because it turned out they didn't have the right licence to sell them, and several Disney Christmas movies were pulled from Amazon Video accounts one Christmas, as Disney tried to force people to more expensive options. I think this turned out to be an accident in the end, but 'Download to Own' is definitely misleading.

I repeat, DRM-free, hack or pirate are your only options in a digital only world.
 
I agree with a lot of stuff said in here but I believe that if the world goes digital only, a lot will change, companies will have to adjust themselves, incluiding policies and whatever else. I believe it will be a better digital world than today.
 
How would I have beautiful shelves of stuff to show off to people, or to admire when deciding what to watch if we go digital only.

I think future generations will miss out on something special as the feeling of getting a brand new release from a store/in mail box is always so refreshing as you explore the packaging, and examine the beauties of your new addition.
 
As always, Jerome has a valid point, but makes it with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and taints it with hypocrisy. If legal streaming was such a pain, then his rant would include Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and all the other legal streamers out there, but he can't bite the hands that feed him, or those services which carry Manganimatsu content. Instead he focuses on the company that he can't deal with, CR.

But when you see news like this.

Sony writing down their Entertainment Division to the tune of $1 billion due to faster than expected declines in BD and DVD, crappy movies, and Ghostbusters, then you have to see that for the mainstream, ownership of physical media is already a thing of the past.

That's bound to have an effect on niche entertainment too. Which brings us back to the move away from the mass market model of Manga, and to the niche, expensive collector's edition model of Anime Limited. Manga might be trying to redress the balance by moving away from niche anime, and towards the nostalgia mass market shows like Yu-Gi-Oh etc, but the mass market is where the most rapid decline in home media is.

If discs die, I've got a lifetime collection of home entertainment to keep me busy with re-watches, and I will never pay to stream. So as long as CR's free SD streams are available, I'll watch the new anime and pine away for the long lost days when I could own it on disc. But once disc is dead, they'll have no more need for free streaming, so I guess that won't last long either. I'll just put the eye-patch on when I feel the need, which given how much time I have to stream these days, won't exactly be a grand larceny, rather than an occasional misdemeanor.
 
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To be fair here the reason big Hollywood BD and DVD is streaming is due to the rise in Netflix (doesn't help that most Hollywood films are ****).

The thing about a niche markets like anime it has very dedicated collectors so I don't think anime would be that affected as compared to Hollywood like for example how well Yuri on Ice sold.

Based on the weekly sales chart in JP it seems sales are general the same as always with the tops shows getting 2-6k sales per volume (sales data outside of JP isn't collected as much so is hard to comment on)

I pay for legal streaming atm since I enjoy 1080p content, and watching the newest stuff asap. I prefer physical discs since I own them for life.
 
Just Passing Through said:
As always, Jerome has a valid point, but makes it with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and taints it with hypocrisy. If legal streaming was such a pain, then his rant would include Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and all the other legal streamers out there, but he can't bite the hands that feed him, or those services which carry Manganimatsu content. Instead he focuses on the company that he can't deal with, CR.

But when you see news like this.

Sony writing down their Entertainment Division to the tune of $1 billion due to faster than expected declines in BD and DVD, crappy movies, and Ghostbusters, then you have to see that for the mainstream, ownership of physical media is already a thing of the past.

That's bound to have an effect on niche entertainment too. Which brings us back to the move away from the mass market model of Manga, and to the niche, expensive collector's edition model of Anime Limited. Manga might be trying to redress the balance by moving away from niche anime, and towards the nostalgia mass market shows like Yu-Gi-Oh etc, but the mass market is where the most rapid decline in home media is.

If discs die, I've got a lifetime collection of home entertainment to keep me busy with re-watches, and I will never pay to stream. So as long as CR's free SD streams are available, I'll watch the new anime and pine away for the long lost days when I could own it on disc. But once disc is dead, they'll have no more need for free streaming, so I guess that won't last long either. I'll just put the eye-patch on when I feel the need, which given how much time I have to stream these days, won't exactly be a grand larceny, rather than an occasional misdemeanor.
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There was a rumour that Crunchyroll's recent experimentation in Canada (they flipped it so all content was only free for the first 11 weeks) was going to be applied to another market with a significantly devalued currency. I don't think the rumour held any water, but I'm not sure we can assume Crunchyroll's free service will remain forever.

If we were talking conspiratorially, Canada is the ideal test market because they won't lose the ability to afford Canadian rights if their changes mess up. (They have to buy Canadian rights as part of a package with US rights.) Could an intentional market survive such a change, who knows?
 
How did we go from legal streaming being the only solution to cancelling subscriptions and pirating everything? That only makes sense if you're already pirating rather than legal streaming, surely? Pirating the Japanese BDs in particular is indefensible when you can just buy them. Of course they're insanely expensive and doing so likely means giving up all other forums of entertainment, but UK fans who must own something aren't special snowflakes who deserve to be exempt from those prices if they want that exact product.

I do think that a free service is necessary for enticing new fans across (and it's part of what I hate about Netflix/Amazon Prime's new anime thing). It would be very sad to lose that, though I like to think Canada is a special case because the rights are coming bundled already and it's the currency which is being problematic. We are a special case too in that there are now cases of the UK companies licensing shows CR has already paid for once back to CR just for this one tiny region, which adds costs to support the UK that they might not have had to pay without the intervention of the UK companies. It's an elephant in the room for sure, but it would be a sad day if the existence of our UK distributors and their choice to squat on streaming rights one day locks the free CR service away from us.

Personally speaking, I don't care if the discs disappear from the UK because 99% of Manganimatsu's output is a copy of a US release, and the US has already successfully made streaming work out as an alternative to television yet continues to release discs for anything even remotely popular (unless AoA is using it as some kind of evil guinea pig). The content will still be available, it will just be slightly more annoying to get - except it won't for me because I'm boycotting Manganimatsu already and importing their stuff when I want it. Of course I like that it's available in the UK too, but as a purely selfish consumer I am not as afraid over Manganimatsu crumbling as Jerome is, and have no reason to be, so he needs to sort his company's problems out for himself and stop impeding me if he wants me to stop being mad he's reducing the availability of anime to UK fans. If he makes the most money by withholding anime from entire groups of people, which blocking legal streaming is certainly doing, then he's not providing a relevant service to anime distribution in this country any more. It's the same as companies who only release dub-only edited kiddy anime; they're not providing a service for fans of those shows as they want the originals, so those fans don't buy their content. It would be sad to see Manganimatsu reduced to a different flavour of that behaviour through mismanagement after years of being so important in the UK.

R
 
Rui said:
We are a special case too in that there are now cases of the UK companies licensing shows CR has already paid for once back to CR just for this one tiny region, which adds costs to support the UK that they might not have had to pay without the intervention of the UK companies. It's an elephant in the room for sure, but it would be a sad day if the existence of our UK distributors and their choice to squat on streaming rights one day locks the free CR service away from us.
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I really hope I'm misreading this, but it reads like you're saying UK distributors should donate their streaming rights to CR if they already have US rights so that people can stream them for free, and CR can profit from it while the distributor gets literally zero return.
 
Jaysgba said:
I really hope I'm misreading this, but it reads like you're saying UK distributors should donate their streaming rights to CR if they already have US rights so that people can stream them for free, and CR can profit from it while the distributor gets literally zero return.
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No, I'm saying that they shouldn't squat on the rights in the first place unless they intend to use them instead of holding fans to ransom because CR isn't going to pay a fortune for the right to latecast one obscure niche comedy show in one territory. Grabbing the simulcast rights at the start and then smearing another company in public when their offer wasn't high enough for you, but not putting the show up anywhere else either, is just a massive inconvenience to legal viewers which serves absolutely nobody. It doesn't make sense to license the rights in the first place if you aren't going to use them; I said it was immoral back when Funimation used to take UK rights and sit on them and now I'm saying it's immoral when Manga UK does the exact same thing.

MVM does it better.

R
 
Rui said:
No, I'm saying that they shouldn't squat on the rights in the first place unless they intend to use them instead of holding fans to ransom because CR isn't going to pay a fortune for the right to latecast one obscure niche comedy show in one territory. Grabbing the simulcast rights at the start and then smearing another company in public when their offer wasn't high enough for you, but not putting the show up anywhere else either, is just a massive inconvenience to legal viewers which serves absolutely nobody. It doesn't make sense to license the rights in the first place if you aren't going to use them; I said it was immoral back when Funimation used to take UK rights and sit on them and now I'm saying it's immoral when Manga UK does the exact same thing.

MVM does it better.

R
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You're absolutely right. Manga should've accepted Crunchyroll's offer so we could then still not get to stream it just like AL and Kiss Him Not Me.
 
Jaysgba said:
You're absolutely right. Manga should've accepted Crunchyroll's offer so we could then still not get to stream it just like AL and Kiss Him Not Me.
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I was thinking more like the numerous attempts AL successfully made to get region locks expanded, like say Plastic Memories and the numerous titles added to Viewster/Animax/Vimeo alongside their global streams. I too would like to know what happened with Kiss Him, Not Me, and I have mentioned it a few times on these very forums (I believe I also explicitly said I was going to boycott the physical release of that, because I was quite cross). But I appreciate that's not as fun as trying to insinuate I'm an AL fanboy to undermine my valid point about rights squatting.

R
 
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