Originally Posted by strawberry99

Does anyone have information on: Makoto Shinkai's DVDs?

He has released two DVDs and one** is in the works due out later this year.

(1) Voices of a Distant Star
(2) The Place Promised in Our Early Days
(3) 5 Centimeters Per Second**

I purchased the stand alone Voices of a Distant Star several years ago, reeled in by the wonderful cover art, and internet trailer. The story itself turned out to be a lengthy poetic anime. A definite change of pace.

Come years later, a dual pack is released. This time a composite with 3 disc. Rightstuf currently has it on sale for $23.99 (retail: $39.98) likely will expire once you read this post).

http://www.rightstuf.com/1-800-338-6...7930/4/153/100

Note, I already have the Voices of a Distant Star DVD. But the question is, should I buy this dual collection (3 disc) or wait until 5 Centimeters Per Second is available and packaged together with his previous works. OR will 5 Centimeter only be released as a stand alone edition?

Originally Posted by WTK

Blood+ Release Information w/ 3D Cover Arts

Blood+, Vol.1

• 5 episodes
• Full Screen Presentations
• Audio: Japanese and English Stereo
• Subtitles: English, French and Korean subtitles

Blood+, Part 1

• 25 episodes (5 episodes per disc)
• 6-Disc Gift Set in Collectible Packaging
• Inside Blood+ Bonus Disc – includes interviews
• Full Screen Presentations
• Audio: Japanese and English Stereo
• Subtitles: English, French and Korean subtitles
• Exclusive T-Shirt
• Exclusive Manga Sampler

Originally Posted by strawberry99

The second question of whether or not I dislike ImaginAsian was not really suppose to be answered. It's an indirect attack on Bandai Visual's no-dub-release practices. (Most of their titles in fact lack a dub track).

Originally Posted by Mr Bear1116

I still don't understand why anyone wants to watch dubs.

Originally Posted by Mr Bear1116

Remember, these shows are not made for us.

Originally Posted by Mr Bear1116

The demands of the average American that everything should be in English is one of our many negative qualities. They say if you speak two languages you are bi-lingual, three tri-lingual, four quad-lingual, and if you speak one you are American.

Originally Posted by strawberry99

Is this a stand alone movie/OVA?

King of Bandits Jing: Seventh Heaven
http://www.amazon.com/King-Bandits-J...1768174&sr=8-1

Originally Posted by WTK

Things aren't going very well with ADV...right now we don't know what will happen. Will titles be canceled or delayed indefinitely? Only time will tell.

ANN had a 2nd update to their initial article. Robert's Anime Corner Store posted a recent blog as well. The ICv2 article is not official and was leaked online. We really don't know if that article is accurate or not. The newest Anime Talk covered a little of this matter as well.

To me, it's going to be a rough year for the N. American anime industry.

Originally Posted by dsmith

Til now (according to KONNO), the original/up til now business plan for the JP market was to recoup most (80%?) of the production cost in the DVD sales. We have figures somewhere (can someone find them?) of 'typical' production costs per episode, and we also have a variety of samples of DVD costs for the R2 market, and apparently some figures on typical sales numbers for R2 releases.

Pulling a popular show from last season, Claymore, and looking at values from Amazon.co.jp's site: 6930 (RRP) per disc for 3 episodes puts it at 2310 per episode. Slightly different figures for the special editions and the 2-ep disc, but this should work fine for now.

Previous comments give a range of sales figures from 5k to 20k; I'll pull one and say 10k sales per (random figure; if someone knows where to get actual figures, please correct this). That means gross sales values of 23,100,000 Y per episode, or about $230,000.

A December blog post on dot-anime puts typical production costs at $90k - $165k. Claymore had pretty good, if not great, production values (mainly outsourced to Korea), with a very top-end cast of voice actresses. Will give it a range of $125k - $150k base cost.

If 45% of the gross sales gets back to the company as profit (assuming 50% wholesale cost, and deducting 5% for the actual physical costs of the DVDs; not guaranteed, as the JP market distrubution works differently than that of the US, so I can't say that that figure is at all accurate), that's $103.5k, for 69%-83% of the production costs being returned. So let's say that they targetted (and got) 75% of the total production cost paid for by the R2 DVD run.

So the 'small amount' that they'd want to recoup via North American sales would be 25% of the production cost, or $57,500 per episode. A good enough figure to work with for now. Anyway, he's saying current arrangements are such that they aren't able to recover the full amounts that are being asked for.

John Sirabella, I believe, made a comment recently about how much they were paying for total licensing costs. Found one post (not sure it's the one I was looking for, but close enough):

That puts it pretty much in line with the little bit of theorycrafting above. And:

Which means that the above postulated $57.5k/episode is not out of line with actual expectations. If the JP domestic return was 70%, the target cost would be about $70k/episode.

I'll go with $60k/episode as the target price they'd set for the US licensor (maybe start at $50k and hope for $70k from bidding, whatever). Now move this to the US side.


The US side now has a 'production cost' of $60k/episode, plus dubbing ($10k) and other miscellaeny (marketing plus the physical production of the DVD). Call it $75k per episode.

Using the 'standard' model of a 6-disc release at $30 RRP and 50% wholesale cost, they need to sell 21,667 units per disc volume just to pay the production costs (never mind profit). Unfortunately, selling over 20k units per disc these days seems rather more unusual than typical.

BV is going instead for the ultra-niche approach. Given the base production cost of $60k + $5k misc, but without the $10k for the dub, and spread over 13 discs at $40 per disc (same basic model as the Shigofumi/True Tears releases) means they need to sell 6500 units per disc to recoup the production cost, less than 1/3 as many unit sales as the standard model. They'd need to sell 7500 units per disc if they added a dub.


Now, BV certainly doesn't need to sell nearly as many units per volume to maintain profitability, but that 6500 sales is still a rather substantial portion of the sales market that ADV (for example) might hope for. Therefore what they're betting on may simply be that the buying market in the US is not very elastic.

In other words: they think that those 6500 buyers that they're targetting are the type that will likely buy almost regardless of cost (ie: hardcore collector types with lots of disposable income), but that the additional 15k buyers they'd need for a standard release are part of a curve that isn't climbing quickly enough as the price is reduced. Or working from the other direction, that the number of purchasers does not drop as quickly as an increase in price might initially indicate.


Having the market grow to where the studios could reliably expect to sell at least 25k units per volume of any given series would seem to be enough to make the market fairly solid. Unfortunately we don't seem to have that. Kind of sad given how little 25k sales is. However...


How many series are released each month? Someone ran some numbers in one of the other recent threads, and I think it was something like 40-50 volumes per month. Assuming there's some movies and re-releases in there, will call it 40 new titles per month (should at least be able to reach that if Geneon's releases were considered included, looking at last year's market). 25k sales per volume for 40 volumes would be 1 million DVDs sold per month.

Now, of the 37 titles in the little ADV fiasco, 32 are series, and of those I (who tends to buy quite a lot, relatively speaking) intend to buy or have bought 10-12 of the series listed. So at the high end a consumer may likely buy 1/3 of all releases. I'll estimate the low end of the regular buyer at 5% of all releases, and an average at maybe 10%. That means you'd need about 10 million active buyers to sustain the market.

10 million would allow for a typical sales of about 25k/volume. I seem to recall, though, that typical sales were more like 10k/volume. That means 4 million active buyers. Of course that assumes licenses running $60k/episode are the average, where it's more likely that it's a range of something like $30k-$60k, and an average of something like $45k. Even so, you're still going to need around 15k-20k units sold per volume, so targetting 25k per volume is still a good goal.

Anyway, if 2/3 of that 4 million were 'hardcore' types willing to pay BV's premium, that would be enough to sustain their model. For the other studios to really thrive, though, they'd need to more than double the number of active buyers. This is where the fansub differential comes in.


Now, I know that Claymore was a very popular download title, with something in the range of 100k-120k downloads per episode during the run, and approaching 200k total now. If we assume that the number of people who'd download the series is roughly in proportion with the number of people who would buy a series (ie: about 10% of all potential consumers), and assuming a very optimistic viewpoint that Claymore represents an 'average' (since downloading bittorents is a bit more troublesome than just going to YouTube), that puts the fansub populace at 2 million. If you consider Claymore to be at the upper edge of the sampling curve, the fansub populace may be just 1 million. That seems a bit low, though.

Still, that's 25%-50% of the apparent active buying group, with no indication of the amount of overlap. Absolute worst case, the studios are losing 1/3 of their potential revenue to 'freeloaders'. However even if we take that worst case and convert it to best case (all those fansub watchers buy DVDs, giving a total purchase collective of 6 million people), that's not enough to compensate for the apparent issues in the market.


Going in the other direction, what happens if studios start going to collected seasons?

First, pricing. Along similar 'niche' lines, I'll consider "Dr. Who" as comparable, and it's running $100/season set. As people start getting antsy once prices start getting into triple digits, we'll consider $100 as our benchmark.

Now, the above price cost for Claymore ended up at $1.95 million for the entire season. With 50% RRP wholesale costs, that means 39,000 sets need to be sold. Hmmm.

Consider total number of volumes that the studios need to sell with each model to break even.

BV model: 6500 * 13 = 84,500
Standard model: 21,667 * 6 = 130,000
Season set: 39,000


The BV model needs significantly fewer total individual sales to break even (spread out over a greater period of time), but the the season model only needs half as many as even the BV model. Then look at the cost for the consumer: 6x$30 = $180 (typical, but still plenty of complaints) vs 13x$40 = $520 (huge numbers of complaints) vs 1x$100 (?).


The season set model would take advantage of a number of factors:
1) Apparent inelasticity of the market: collectors will pay the price regardless
2) People being used to buying entire season sets of US shows
3) Total price being significantly lower per customer
4) Entire show available immediately instead of waiting 8-12 months to complete due to the periodic release schedule (tied in to the whole issue of how soon you can see the show after it originally airs)

Primary disadvantage is the Fruits Basket issue: people looking solely at the price rather than how much content is available. The fact that it is collected as a season, though, I think will help offset that.

It becomes a question of just how elastic the market is with regard to price. In the early days of anime releases we had a few season collections (Tenchi Muyo, Fushigi Yugi, etc), though they were fairly high priced, and the fact that studios stopped doing them seems to indicate they didn't work terribly well. However the overall DVD marketplace has changed since then with the rampant proliferation of TV show box sets, and I think this has a high probability of working in the US licensors' favor.

It also happens that 39,000 sales of the season set is right at the 10% mark for the apparent current market size of 4 million consumers. If that purchase percentage can be sustained, then the market would be stable at its current size rather than floundering. However it's likely to drop at least some. The degree to which it drops would determine the overall viability.


Refiguring the titles per month issue: 500 releases per year would be dropped to maybe 100 per year (mix of 13-ep and 26-ep seasons, plus movies), or maybe 10 releases per month (mostly seasons with a movie or two). 4 million people buy 10% of 40 releases per month at $30 RRP comes out to $48 mil per month (someone has actual sales figures floating around somewhere, I know).

Split that across 10 releases at $100 per title, that's 48,000 sales. Even if sales dropped by 1/6 due to the higher base cost, that's still enough to break even with the production cost, which the current standard model isn't doing (only getting 10k sales where perhaps 15k-20k are needed).


This would certainly explain why Funi wants to go this direction. It would also essentially eliminate the current secondary thinpak market, including the side-effect of people wanting to wait for a cheap boxset a year or so down the line which depress singles' sales figures.


Anyway, I think I can now see why BV is going the direction they are, but they're misguided by wanting to keep in step with the Japanese way of doing things. Thus, while it's a (potential) improvement over the standard model, it's still not nearly as good as it could be.

Originally Posted by dsmith

First, a correction: The numbers for the BV model are for a full 26 episode series, split and priced at the same level as the current PR announcement, not a 13 episode series. $520 total cost vs $180 total cost is 26 episode vs 26 episode. I realize BV hasn't released such a series yet, but I was using their most recent price model to build a price comparison, not any particular series.

Most US TV shows run $40-$60 per season set. However expecting sets to be priced at that amount seems somewhat unrealistic at this point. Pricing a full season at $50/set would require 78,000 sales, and I don't think (I could be wrong) that there's a sufficient market of buyers to get that many sales just yet, considering the number of series currently being released. That assumes that my extrapolations about the size of the anime market are correct, and also that we're dealing with a $60k/episode series.

I set the price at $100 (well, $99.99) both because that's the upper limit of pricing before people start getting really twitchy, and because there's a passably popular regular example (Dr. Who) that's also set at that price. Also, anime has always commanded a premium compared to normal Hollywood releases simply due to its niche nature. Why pay $30 for just 1 disc of a series (out of 6 to possibly 8) when you can get an entire season of Buffy for $40, Seinfeld for $50, or Law and Order for $60? That point is that you're not directly competing with those shows.

However I do understand the concern about the individual sale price. Someone who might buy 3 singles in a single purchase may be willing to instead buy just 1 season set, but someone who can only afford 1 or 2 discs at a time will struggle a bit more with it. And as mentioned, there's the Fruits Basket mindset. However Fruits Basket, while a good deal, still came out as singles. There was no way for a casual buyer to know that it was a 4 disc series rather than a 6-8 disc series (since there were still plenty of 8 disc releases back then), and the immediate impression may have been that the studio was trying to jack the prices up.

In this case, however, it's being presented as a complete season to the buyer. There are no additional hooks in having to keep track of how many additional purchases you need to consider. That should make this a far more reasonable consideration. For the same reason, I don't think splitting the season into two 13 episode sets would be good, since that's just more Fruits Basket.


Now, I speculated that licensing costs would typically range from $30k to $60k per episode ($70k at the upper limit for Sirabella and probably most others). At the low end, for a series that cost $90k per episode to produce (see previous post), and that sold 5k units at ¥4000 per disc, licencing cost to recoup full production cost should be $25k/episode.

Adding in dubbing and misc costs, if you could expect 40,000 sales (rather unrealistic for a low-budget series if we're also targetting 40k sales for the high-budget series) you could price it at $52 to recoup the cost. Dropping the dub you could target 40k sales at $40/set. At this point in time I can't see general pricing at less than $60 per set as feasible. However a potential range of $60-$100/set seems like it could offer enough flexibility to be manageable.


There is another issue, though, related to the pricing and the total number of customers needed. My numbers assume a full, immediate conversion from singles to season sets. The reason I'd postulate the possibility of 40k sales is that I expect that the total money being spent would not change significantly, and thus more customers would be buying each of a few targetted releases per month instead of being spread out among dozens of diffuse series.

That fails in a partial environment. If most series are still released as singles, a high priced box set has to compete with a much shallower purchasing pool. Experimenting with just 1 or 2 series this way will most likely fail.

On the upside, Funi has stated that this is the way they want to go for all releases. If ADV gets on board, that's about 2/3 of all releases per month, which should be sufficient to make the switch to season sets viable.


The followup consideration, though, is annoying: Japanese fears of reverse importation. Consider the Claymore example. Sell it as a box set in the US for $100. The full release of R2 DVDs would cost the Japanese buyer $600. There's enough differential there to make the Japanese companies twitchy. However I have to say, if they're making sufficient money on the DVD releases right now vs fansubs which people can download for -free-, how is a Japanese customer buying the US release (and thus indirectly paying you anyway) really hurting your business?

Peculiar side thought: The one primary factor the JP companies can hold onto as a differentiating factor vs the US release is the quality of the R2 release. It makes me wonder if there are stipulations in the licensing contracts regarding a maximum quality that the US release is allowed to have. Sounds like a similar concern in the music and movie industry about imperfect (VHS/analog/etc) copies being somewhat tolerable compared to perfect digital copies with no loss in quality. Would explain many things.

Originally Posted by Maxflier

I can't read all of that because it gives me a headache, but I hope Claymore comes out here in the US. I am really looking forward to that one.

Originally Posted by John Sinnott

I didn't read the entire post that WTK quoted (only made it half way), but there's a huge error: he's not taking into account TV revenues. Anime existed before DVDs and video tapes. His argument would hold for an OVA series, but not for TV shows, and most anime does start on TV. I'd be willing to bet that they get 80-110% of the production cost from the TV rights.

Also, Bandai Visual can't be selling many discs at all. I'd be willing to bet they aren't even making four digit sales. TRSI sells them but the major e-tailers don't, and no chain retailer does either. Even if someone wanted to buy their $50 discs it's hard to find them.

Originally Posted by ICv2

February 01, 2008

ICv2 has learned that ADV Films has chosen the Blu-ray high definition format and plans to begin releasing high def versions of some titles as early as this spring. A hghly placed source at the company told us that "frontlist is more important than catalogue right now," so the first high def releases will be the company's newest titles. The move to begin releasing Blu-ray versions of some releases may have an impact on ADV's release schedule on some releases, as high def transfers will have to be prepared.

High definition is at a turning point, with Warner Bros. recent decision to support Blu-ray exclusively beginning in June (the studio had previously supported both formats) swinging the momentum toward the format in its war against HD. Player sales moved heavily toward Blu-ray in the wake of the Warners announcement. But the Toshiba-led HD group is not lying down -- it will run a Superbowl ad supporting the format this weekend.

Anime companies have been slow to begin high def releases, with concerns over the format war one important reason. High end distributor Bandai Visual has releases in both high def formats. Sony has released its features Tekkonkinkreet and Paprika in Blu-ray format. And FUNimation has expressed support for high definition anime as format issues become settled (see "Interview with Gen Fukunaga, Part 1"). But ADV appears to be willing to make its bet and move forward in a big way, believing that anime fans want the quality that high definition brings.

The move comes amidst a lot of speculation about ADV's future, after a tough year in the market in 2007, the ending of ADV's Newtype license (see "Newtype Successor Broadens Focus"), and discussion on fan sites about changes to ADV's Website. ADV issued a statement this week. "We know there are a lot of rumors swirling about, and that fans are looking for assurances that ADV will continue to distribute the anime series they know and love," the statement said. "While we can't go into any detail at this time, please know that ADV is working through a few short-term challenges and fully intends to continue our releases. We thank you for your patience."

Perhaps with its move to high definition, the picture at ADV will become clearer.

Originally Posted by WTK

Originally Posted by dtcarson

That red Complete Collection contains the entire series, I traded my four-volume release for the one-volume CE when it came out.
(I definitely prefer the sub dialog to the dub; Urara was a spoiled little brat in the dub, but a lot more naive/conflicted/honest in the sub, imho.)

Originally Posted by strawberry99

The following is more directed to hardcore subtitle fans. One must realize that Anime released in Japan lack subtitles. The original maker NEVER intended it to be supplied with subtitles. Watching anime with subtitles "kills" the originality so openly supported by subtitled-advocates.

Originally Posted by nezumi

By this logic, one could argue that since anime released in Japan lacks an English dialogue track, watching dubbed anime "kills" the originally so openly supported by dub-advocates. A more accurate statement would be, "Japanese creators rarely produce anime with foreign markets in mind." Additionally, there have been a number of anime DVDs released in Japan with optional subtitles (Japanese and English). Subtitling doesn't destroy the integrity of a work, but it can expand the reach of a creator's work to people that might not otherwise see it (not only foreign markets, but also those with hearing impairments). Finally, I doubt any creator has ever refused to include subtitles with their work, because subtitles would somehow damage its artistic value. That would be akin to a manga artist refusing to add dialogue balloons, because the balloons would ruin his/her visual compositions.

Originally Posted by strawberry99

Valid points.

Japanese anime with an English audio track surely "kills" the works originality but it more closely mirrors likely how anime is watched in Japan--utilization of both sense (eyes/ears) simultaneously as opposed to reading. Taking the handicapped out of the picture, the subtitle feature found on Japanese DVD releases is surely not meant to replace what can be heard.

Japanese subtitle geared towards the hearing impaired is understandable just as that feature is available on Hollywood DVD movies.

Manga is in essence literature. Most literature use words to convey the story, and the dialogue bubble is surely needed. How else is the artist suppose to get his/her point across? Manga language has been translated to English just as the original Japanese track in anime has been dubbed in English. It's a one to one correlation. English subtitles in conjunction with the Japanese track adds an extra variable required for full understanding. On the flip side, dubbed viewing mimics the Japanese audience more closely--again, the use of eyes/ears simultaneously. Eyes to grasp the visuals; Ears to grasp the audio.

The addition of subtitles adds another variable.