Re: MangaUK Going Blu-Ray Only With Ben-To And Good Luck Gir
I think a few people are looking at this backwards.
Manga UK is doing this experiment with Ben-To and GLG not in spite of the fact that they're niche titles, but because they're niche titles. I'm openly critical of Manga (and especially Jerome) most of the time but he explained it quite clearly in the video and his position is completely consistent with everything Manga UK have said in the past.
1. It now costs Manga UK more to produce DVD than it does for them to produce BD. They can clone the US/Aussie BDs in a trice, but with DVD they have to pay people to create brand new materials, and these materials often introduce creative new glitches which didn't exist on the foreign versions.
2. Everyone else is moving away from PAL DVD so this situation is only going to get worse, not better. Creating the new DVD masters also increases the time they have to wait after the US release, cannibalising their sales further.
3. Anime in the UK is a niche market. Having two competing formats for incredibly niche titles that will only sell 500 copies in total combined is not financially viable when physical media is subject to minimum print runs.
4. Big titles like Attack on Titan are obviously going to outsell the best niche titles on both formats regardless, so producing DVDs and BDs for these to get them into the hands of as many fans as possible is a wise move. If a mainstream hit like Attack on Titan on BD is outselling DVD 5:1 even without it being exclusive to BD, it's a strong sign that the market is moving on.
Think about it; if more people are buying Manga UK BDs than DVDs already, and we already know that the BDs cost fans more than the DVDs, the market isn't likely to shy away from this. Some of the DVD fans will refuse to buy or switch to importing, others will make the jump up to BD; no matter what that split turns out to be it's probably not going to do Manga UK any more harm than all of their DVD-only titles have in the past, except this way they're making more money out of the deal.
-Danielle- noted BD-only people can still watch DVDs, just not in their desired quality. That's a very fair point, but it's already apparent from the criticism of the DVD-only titles in the release thread each week that it's splitting the market in two and driving the BD people to imports. The BD people are the early adopters, the ones who spend a lot on brand new releases instead of waiting for deals, so that's a big problem for Manga; they make most of their profits on preorders, not on savvy shoppers who want to save money.
Although everyone who can play BD can also play DVD, not everyone in that position wants to. As well as the video and audio being worse than legal streams, DVD-only releases have been plagued by poor PAL conversions, missing extras and other issues; they're simply not desirable to a certain audience when overseas versions exist. I'd take a NTSC DVD over no release at all, but I flat out won't buy Manga UK's PAL conversions any more after all the money I've wasted replacing them with US editions over the years.
On the other reasonable point that not everyone has a HDTV, I understand that. However, I would wager that almost everyone reading this has a HD monitor, and laptops can use USB BD drives if you aren't able to install an internal one. I completely sympathise with being in a position where technology advances before you're ready to and forces you to spend money you didn't want to - I'm still using my Nintendo DS even though I'm deeply jealous of its successors, and my phone is ancient.
I would be more than happy for Manga UK to release Ben-To on DVD, BD, LD, VHS and every other format under the sun, in a hundred different languages, but if they say it doesn't make commercial sense to do it then it becomes a choice between getting fewer niche releases at all to cater for the DVD-only crowd or moving with the times. Combo packs are a good solution in the US, but in the UK they'd incur all of the drawbacks of a separate DVD release and nobody would want to pay extra for the format they don't want. We've seen the arguments against them raised dozens of times and the UK market isn't big enough for the distributors to be able to absorb the cost of mastering the second disc like they can in the US.
(One last point, I doubt that Manga UK (or Kaze) are even allowed to release BDs of some of those mainstream shounen titles yet in our tiny market when it would undercut in places they care more about, and they'd require Manga UK to master the BDs from scratch, so it's not the same thing at all.)
R
