Re: [UK Anime Distributor] Anime Limited Discussion Thread
Are there though? I have no idea how many UK fans use Crunchyroll, but if we assume they have around 750,000 paid subscribers all-in...
Massive thread-derailing post under the button.
[spoilerbutton]The US population is roughly 5x that of the UK, but Crunchyroll serve the entire world and the UK population is less than 1% of that. Since not all regions are equal (and some regions - including the UK - get substantially more direct Crunchyroll marketing than others), I'm going to assume the size of Crunchyroll's UK audience is in the region of 10,000-20,000 people. I have no idea how accurate that is as a huge majority of UK fans seem to prefer to steal anime with vague excuses about Crunchyroll's catalogue being smaller in the UK, but I'd like to believe it's not too far out. That gives us £150,000-£300,000 as their UK budget for an anime season.
Crunchyroll has offered Jerome $150 (
per episode) for a 12 episode TV show (or possibly 13; I have no idea whether they're broadcasting the missing episode in the US so I'll take the worst case scenario). That's £1,250; not a huge amount by a long way but they also had 40 other UK-accessible simulcasts this season. If $150 is their going rate then the rights holders are getting around £52,000 of the pot no matter how large the UK market actually is. If it's bigger, they're making more money; if it's a lot smaller they're likely to be losing money.
Furthermore, we know that it's unlikely that anime companies are going to Japan and obtaining rights for £1,250 per season, especially if Crunchyroll is pursuing the superior worldwide-aside-from-Japan rights and picking up home video rights too. If Crunchyroll is dealing directly with Japan, they're paying a
lot more than £1,250 for some of those 41 shows with no guarantee they'll be able to recoup the costs. Jerome has paid his minimum guarantee for home video rights (which he intends to use to cover the cost of the license) and streaming (which he intends to squander and not monetise at all). Crunchyroll's model works on the streaming rights being the most important with titles which can support home video going there later. There's very little in it for them to pay out huge sums of money to someone who is effectively acting as a rights squatter in a minor country.
(Heck, with the things Jerome says about Crunchyroll on social media it's questionable whether they benefit from the relationship at all; he's undermining their reputation and refusing to drive traffic their way. He's applying pressure on Japanese companies to avoid the worldwide-outside-Japan licensing model which benefits Crunchyroll in order to profit from a situation which blocks fans from accessing anime and causes them to accuse Crunchyroll instead. It's not a healthy atmosphere in which to do business.)
This doesn't even scratch the surface of that fact that a legal stream can be used to promote the future UK home video release (why don't people do this?) and that £1,250 isn't being replaced by revenue from anywhere else, so unless Jerome is right that piracy doesn't harm sales but legal streaming does, I question the logic of turning away free money. It would be different if he was shopping it to Animax or even a paid service like Amazon or iTunes, which would be annoying but at least internally logical.
Then, of those 10,000-20,000 UK users, how many will even watch and like Sakamoto? It's a very Japanese comedy. It's obviously not exactly an Attack On Titan tier hit, and it's not going to get an offer equivalent to whatever they paid for something like that. If nobody watches it at all even when they're a paid subscriber, that's money Crunchyroll saw no benefit from other than being able to brag that they licensed an even larger number of shows.
On top of all of the minimum guarantees for the more expensive titles, there are also other costs they need to take out of that £150,000-£300,000 pot.
- Payment processing (on a £5 monthly payment this could be around 27p on average if everyone uses Paypal: £2,7500-£5,500, plus costs of chargebacks, compliance and integration)
- Staff costs (I don't know how many people they employ or their salaries but there are obviously a reasonable number of them from technical support through to licensing and marketing: £??,???)
- Operating costs (covering everything from rent to expenses to server and technology costs: £??,???)
- Marketing (they do a lot of this; the cost of attending trade shows is substantial; they also produce videos and run add plenty of online ad campaigns: £??,???)
- Reinvestment in the industry - we're seeing Crunchyroll co-productions now and this is actively and directly improving anime for fans all around the world...
- Profit (I assume they do actually want to make some of this to keep their investors happy)
It seems plausible that the more expensive directly-negotiated licenses alone can gobble up the whole of the available pot given how much we know some of these things are likely to cost, and personally I don't want Crunchyroll to go out of business as it would put us right back in the dark days of the 90s for legal anime access in the UK.
Andrew will have a much more nuanced view of the situation than that since he has hands-on experience of the streaming world from half a dozen different angles at this point (he probably knows it better than Crunchyroll themselves!)[/spoilerbutton]
But just because Jerome thinks streaming Sakamoto late in the UK is worth more than £1,250 doesn't mean that it's necessarily true.
R
P.S. If I can get UK streaming-only rights to shows for £1,250 I'm booking a trip to Japan right now to make some cash and save UK anime streaming singlehandedly. Crunchyroll is obviously paying a lot more than that to license some of their shows directly.
