Japanese companies aim to quell YouTube viewers

Paul

Paul

Ghost of Animes
Administrator
Showing belated signs of their growing annoyance, Japanese TV stations are apparently taking steps to prevent their popular TV shows (including anime) from appearing on popular video streaming websites like YouTube. In an article on this very subject, MSNBC.com specifically names The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (anime exploded in Japan during spring 2006 and has become a "national phenomenon") and it's "2,000 related clips" as being a good example of this "problem".
 
Fair enough I say. Besides you can hardly read the subtitles on youtube and the audio and video quality is usually compressed so much that there's no point in watching it.
 
Thats how my sister watches most of her anime because i'm usually to lazy to download it, lol.
I have to say i've got sucked into YouTube aswell recently so it would be a shame if anything happened to it, but if it's really effecting Japanese ratings that much then you can see how they would be annoyed
 
I hate the quality on youtube, so I wait for DVDs. I find it hard to watch stuff (aside from humourous videos) on a monitor, it has to be a TV for me.
 
Espy said:
I hate the quality on youtube, so I wait for DVDs. I find it hard to watch stuff (aside from humourous videos) on a monitor, it has to be a TV for me.
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Totally agree. I want the best possible experience when watching anime. :)
 
I can't say I'm surprised really - it had to happen sooner or later. Quite honestly the YouTube webmasters have been treading on thin ice for a while now - I even stumbled over a complete (albeit godawful quality) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a few months back!

Clips and AMVs I think are fine but it's to be expected (and understandable) that whole TV show episodes and feature films are getting the corporate types worried.
 
WTFDaveMustaine said:
Fair enough I say. Besides you can hardly read the subtitles on youtube and the audio and video quality is usually compressed so much that there's no point in watching it.
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Frankly I think that's exactly the reason why no action should be taken. From the posts in this thread, one can see that nobody, given the choice, would prefer YouTube to a DVD - so it's not really much of a problem.

Personally, I think YouTube is good for the anime market, as I use it to view a sample of an anime I'm interested in, or find new ones altogether. If I like what I see, then I buy a DVD (hehe, rhyme), and that's that.

If YouTube didn't show anime, I'd have never had thought to watch Love Hina, of which I now own 5 DVDs.
 
adamcube said:
WTFDaveMustaine said:
Fair enough I say. Besides you can hardly read the subtitles on youtube and the audio and video quality is usually compressed so much that there's no point in watching it.
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Frankly I think that's exactly the reason why no action should be taken. From the posts in this thread, one can see that nobody, given the choice, would prefer YouTube to a DVD - so it's not really much of a problem.
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Nah, I know someone who's watched pretty much all of Bleach, Samurai Champloo, and a lot of Naruto on Youtube. There are a lot of people out there that don't care about quality if it's free. And I'm sure there's a lot of Americans that keep it going.
 
Its a fair cop. YouTube has just become another method of spreading pirate and illegal material of late and I’m sick of it. I want to see independent work on the site, what it was designed for, not the latest episodes of whatever.

One can live with there being material that has not been licensed over here yet but when it is licensed there is no excuse. Watch the real thing! Its just a pity that it will make it more difficult to work with You Tube if they really clamp down.
 
I guess thats fair enough, shame though as I watch most of my anime on there.

Am I the only one who finds the subtitals fine to read and have no problem with the audio?
 
I think I've only ever gone on YouTube to watch a few speed runs of boss battles for LOZ: OoT and the odd music clip.
I guess watching anime on YouTube saves people even bothering with the time it takes to download an anime episode; it's like fast-food I guess :lol:
 
I have to admit on one night shift I ran out of stuff to watch on dvd and ended up watching the complete series of Maburaho and have also watched a vast number of Yu Gi Oh Gx but thats mainly cause its on during the day when I'm at work and hate missing an episode (I always forget to tape them).
 
i find the audio and subs fine on them. thankfully i caught up on naruto before they started this, just before ep 200, or that would have sucked to try and see them all.
 
I'd never stream an episode of anime on YouTube - the compression of the video is poor enough to ruin a show for me.

Generally though I think it's futile to try and stop people streaming and downloading video over the net. We live in the year 2006, and its as though a lot of these companies are still stuck in the 90s. There is no way to adequately enforce old copyright laws on a medium as widely accessable and constantly evolving like the internet.

As ever, there is no blatent official alternative either. I'd consider streaming anime over the net if the picture and sound quality was good enough not to harm my experience.

I don't think you can blame anime fans for wanting to watch anime and I think this whole "mess" (fansubs, streaming etc) is basically thanks to a backward thinking industry that is loosing touch with todays tech-savy fans.
 
I can see why the companies are annoyed, but there are a lot of anime that never seem to get released over here. For example, Loveless was released in Japan and America but not in Europe. I would be more than happy to pay the £20 a disc, people in the UK normally pay, if it was released here.

Until then, YouTube is the next best thing.

Somehow, I think some marketing people have missed an opportunity to make shed loads of money - which surprises me.

But I was surprised, that people in japan are watching online instead of tv. It just goes to show how fast the anime world in cyberspace really moves
 
Manga Girls said:
I can see why the companies are annoyed, but there are a lot of anime that never seem to get released over here. For example, Loveless was released in Japan and America but not in Europe. I would be more than happy to pay the £20 a disc, people in the UK normally pay, if it was released here.
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Be patient, it was only released in Japan last year and only just started in the US. Considering the popularity of its release I see it making its way here soon enough, probably through Beez, since they've had some dealings with Media Blasters before.
 
Manga Girls said:
Until then, YouTube is the next best thing.
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I'd say fansubs are the next best thing... both as illegal as each other, but the fansubs are much higher quality than youtube. The only times I've gone on youtube were to check out anime op/endings.
 
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