Many of you like me here are staunch DVD collectors. I myself have a wide variety I collect from. Anywhere from Anime to Criterion. My question primarily concerns Anime DVD's. As anyone who collects this genre knows that the industry rapes us on prices and content. Particularly the TV series Anime. For example putting 3 Episodes on one DVD for close to $30 bucks a pop. To collect the whole series will require you to buy 7 DVD's. All 7 DVD's are distributed 1 1/2 months apart from each other. So it will take you a better part of the year to have the whole collection. Hence my question, with the new HD and Blu Ray DVD's coming out which allow more space to store info, will that translate to entire collections to be stored on 1 disk or perhaps 2 disk set? Or will the industry continue with its current marketing tactic or find some excuse to continue with its current practice?

I really hope i am wrong but i seriously doubt they will give us more episodes per disc than they do on DVD.I fully expect them to keep dragging the series out unnecessarily over 7 fucking discs like a lot of them do now.

They can put more than 3 or 4 eps on a DVD now so I think it will continue the same marketing scheme with the new format(s).

The Japanese market is even worst. They only get 1-2 episodes per disc which is like $50 a pop.

I wonder how much HD-DVD/BluRay would improve on anime...

funny you should also mention Criterion - that's who I am interested in hearing which format they will go with.

To be fair, Geneon and ADV are starting to release bricks and thinpacks of older shows at lower prices.

Of course new releases will be priced high, but then I always wait for the cheaper sets to be released. I don't need to have them right away.

Frankly I think they are ripping us off- those two studios I mentioned have the habit of loading up the disks with almost as much previews and assorted crap as programming. It must harm the programming.

I'm curious as to what effect HD will have on animation in general. I understand it was common practice before the advent of digital animation to shoot animated TV shows on film, but how many older animated shows still exist in that form? Season 1 of The Simpsons apparently exists only as video masters, and that's a popular prime-time network TV show -- I have to wonder how many other, less popular series exist only as standard-resolution video masters and how those would look in HD.

Little or none Dan. Just because the storage format is inherently HD doesn't mean it has to be shown that way. I seriously doubt there will be an incentive to offer older series shot on video in the newer HD formats. At best I can see them fitting a whole series on a single disk at the same resolution, or offering more extras.
Either way, what would be the incentive for them to do even that?

Stuff shot on film? Bring it on! I taped a copy of the Cowboy Bebop movie off Starz-HD and it looks amazing.

FWIW - Samurai Champloo aired in HDTV, I've seen a couple of those and they look fabulous.

WOWWOW Anime HD

As you can see there is anime being broadcast in HD in Japan.

The reason most shows are only 2-3 episodes per disc is that the picture qualitiy of DVDs goes down if you put more than that. thats basic. as for the price and release schedule, its up to the content owners to decide, after all its their shows and if you think the price is too high, dont buy it. As for putting standard def shows on HD-DVD and getting real long play times, I am sure this will be possible and is part of the design but dont expect to see it soon, the market for DVDS will be greater than HD-DVD for quite a while and no body is going to want standard resolution HD-DVDs at first either because the whole point of buying HD-DVD is the HD quality which you would not get in this case.

If you're talking single-layer discs, then that's right... but there's nothing stopping them from using dual-layer discs and they could almost double the number of eps.

As an example I checked Vol 3 from Last Exile. 4 eps, yet uses only 3.7 gigs of disc space.

Picture quality degrades after only 1 hr. of programming? I never realized DVD was so limited.

There is an interesting thread over at AVS in which Alan Gouger compared the dvd of Titan AE to the 35mm film print. It's worth the look. I can't wait to see HD versions of some 35mm animated films.

35mm vs dvd

Every other major studio can manage to fit 4 hour-long drama episodes on a single dual-layer disc. There's no reason you couldn't fit at least 6-8 half hour anime episodes per disc.

Thanks for the link. Very interesting!

Bottom line is no, the new formats won't significantly increase episode per disc counts, at least not for initial releases (for cheap re-releases, it might).

First off, anime is so much more expensive than, say, American TV sets, because of a few reasons. American TV sets have already had significant exposure to the audience here, and so sells far more volume than anime, which is a niche market. Most of the time the company making the DVDs is the company that produced the show, so licensing costs are down (there is also apparently bidding wars for "hot" anime properties). Third, a lot of the TV sets have already made their money many times over by the time they come out on DVD, through commercials when the eps first aired, syndication rights, etc. So it's unfair to compare a season of Friends with an anime disk.

Secondly, let's look at Funimation's Fruits Basket. With FB, they put more episodes per disk at a higher pricepoint. When sales stagnated, they found out that people will shy away from higher prices, even if the value is the same or better. People either want normally priced releases or really cheap re-releases. ADV did an experiment in the opposite direction with Gantz, where they are initially releasing it two eps to a disk at a lower pricepoint, but have since reversed that decision.

Now after an anime series has already made it's money with the initial release, usually a year or so later a cheaper collection is released with the whole season or series. I could see them using the full capacity of the next generation of media for that.