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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rui" data-source="post: 429797" data-attributes="member: 2">Short answer: Lack of faith in glitch-free releases, lack of trust in the UK's biggest anime distributor, and being old enough to have the knowledge and resources be able to buy whatever I want from wherever I want. Long answer: I import heavily. Part of the reason is that those shows which aren't ever going to be considered 'classics' often happen to be my favourites. I discovered long ago in the days of VHS that if I wasn't willing to shop overseas, I wasn't going to get the anime I wanted. I imported Rurouni Kenshin and Yuu Yuu Hakusho from Japan when it seemed unthinkable they would get a US release, and Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 from the US when the UK wasn't going to give me the option to own them (it still hasn't). If I was only sticking to the big shows that find their way to the UK I'd never have become so deeply passionate about anime in the first place.This is still true today. MVM and AL tend to dip into different genres, but part of why it's been so easy to maintain my boycott of Manga/Kaze titles is that they almost never release shows I would have wanted in the first place (and when they do, the quality is not up to my standards). I'm not blaming anyone for this; obviously the companies should choose the titles they think will sell best, and as it turns out I don't have very marketable taste. But since importing is something I have to do anyway, it's just as easy for me to sling the FUNimation release of some mainstream title on my regular US orders as it is to buy locally - the high street is literally dead where I live, and the only advantage of buying locally is to save a few pounds or to pay the thieves at the BBFC for the terrible work they do. When the UK release is just going to be an inferior version of the same masters, it makes no sense to wait. What are the UK companies giving me for waiting? Where is my One Piece stream? When FUNimation drops some show I like in the US due to bad sales and the UK release depends on the US one, won't buying the US versions have more of an effect on future releases than buying here? Why can't the UK companies bally well watch the discs through once before releasing them with catastrophic subtitling errors?That's how I felt up until a couple of years ago. Beez gave me some hope but we all know how that ended up.Today, MVM and AL are the only two companies in the UK I consider relevant as they've been trying to take what's working about the anime market in the US and make it work for the UK too. I'm vocally supportive of MVM's NagiAsu experiment as they participated in the US release too, proving their relevance and helping put together a nice package for everyone (it helps that it's a cracking show; I can forgive the ugly BBFC logos and the extra wait). They don't talk much but they are definitely listening to what people want and trying to find a middle ground, and they're even releasing female-orientated titles instead of parroting off the self-fulfilling prophecy that women don't buy anime when barely any is released for them to begin with - women in the US and Japan don't seem to have any problem feeding money into the market. I'm happy to support MVM releases when I can see they've done their best to give us a decent alternative to importing. AL are more communicative and Andrew is obviously a big anime fan too, so they've been trying to reimagine the US 'premium' model for the UK market and drawing from other US strategies. They've had some struggles along the way but what they've accomplished in the short time they have been around is staggering, and sometimes we even get things the US doesn't - I'm a big importer but I'll definitely double dip if a local release can pull something like that off. AL is also integrating streaming into its business model in a progressive way, and most importantly I feel that if I support AL releases, I get something out of it. In the short term it might be an exclusive artbox or glitch-free release, but more importantly I feel that Andrew is likely to be building up our reputation as a market in Japan and finding ways for some of those deadlocked US-only streams to be UK-viewable, and even putting together cinema screenings! I don't see any future for a region which rehashes a small selection of US releases with BBFC logos plastered on top of the American artwork. I do see a future in what AL is trying to do. I also think that the situation with some restrictions is inherently unreasonable. For anime buyers, region A is so huge that a region A BD is effectively region free, and yet US discs are often region free anyway. In the UK, region free discs are rare and they're mostly released by major studios simplifying their production lines by pressing the same disc for multiple regions. There is literally no impediment to anyone playing back a BD from another region anywhere in the world other than the annoyance of having multiple sets of hardware or software tools, it's a made-up solution to a non-problem perpetutated by stupid licensing agreements.I rarely buy non-anime discs but when I do I'm much more supportive of the UK publishers because their discs are region free and usually identical to the US editions, without all of the quality control issues we regularly suffer with local attempts. I have become firmly convinced that the US is better at making BDs than the UK, or Australia, and I have neither the money nor the patience to continue supporting an inferior process in order to be locked into an inferior region. We all suffer from the industry's haphazard approach to streaming, too; how can the industry consider itself global when countless potential fans who speak English are locked out of English-subtitled streams just because they live in a non-English-majority country? Why are we misleading the Japanese licensors into thinking that all that's required for a worldwide anime release is a stream in the US and Japan? Why are we signing (or supporting releases which result from signing) contracts which lock by language, by location and by player region? I'll tolerate it to some extent because I have to, but it's all a terrible mess and the only people affected are the most loyal buyers who would have supported the product anyway.What really annoys me is all of the hand-wringing and excuses about restrictions at conventions when I know the same restrictions don't apply in other regions. We all understand that Japanese companies are hard-headed and that Japanese culture promotes a very distorted view of what foreigners want and need. As customers we have no power to change that, so I expect the UK distributors to be speaking out on our behalf and changing things for the better on our behalf, not fighting against our interests as I strongly suspect happens on some occasions. One of the things I love about Andrew is that he's completely transparent about what he can and can't do and why he makes the choices he makes; it makes me want to trust him, and he seems to take all of our feedback as customers and fellow fans extremely seriously. That's the kind of thing which makes me buy local when a similar release exists in the US; the belief that supporting the industry will enrich the anime industry in some way, and enrich my experience as a fan. The 'traditional' repackaging model doesn't do that and if it's a choice of that or nothing then I'd rather the local industry simply went away.R</blockquote>

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