By George, I may have called it, if seeing the obvious can be used to ego-stroke oneself.
Just spotted over at AoDVD:
Bandai Visual Gears Up (03:08 PM EST): A new Boss Note at the Bandai Visual USA dot-anime site by company president Tatsunori Konno discusses some of the changes coming up for the company in total as the fiscal year ends and begins anew. Of interest, though without much on the ground detail, is this statement: “I discussed about our business strategy for this year and the next with others in the Namco-Bandai group; our final consensus is that we will present new anime shows simultaneously all over the world.”
And in other news, we’re still waiting to hear a formal announcement of ADV’s demise. It’s been two weeks now…
Edit: and then I went back and read the next paragraph about Clannad’s Claymore’s (arg! Thanks. Andrew) license:
The anime release has no information as of yet but if FUNimation keeps true to what Gen Fukunaga has said in his recent Anime Today podcast, we’ll see this either in sets or in download to own form within the near future as they try to minimize the release windows.
Of course DL to own still means DRM, but it’s better than nothing.
Edit 2: Come to think of it, that explains the price points on True Tears and Shigofumi. Instead of lowering Japanese prices to a reasonable level, they’re jacking up ours to match, and prevent reverse importation.
It definitely looks like they’re going to make a major attempt to sell anime first-run in R1 at prices comparable to what they charge in Japan.
And it’s going to crash and burn hard. No way anyone here will pay that kind of price.
Err… you mean Claymore, not Clannad, right? I got excited for a moment there…
When Konno says “present”, I wonder what kind of presentation he’s talking about. Simultaneous TV broadcast would be impossible for most shows (in the U.S. at least), and simultaneous DVD releases wouldn’t do much for sales (especially if the DVDs are being released at BVUSA’s price/episode ratio). Downloads of subtitled episodes available on or shortly after the airdate would be both feasible and possibly beneficial for them, though, so I hope they’re looking in that direction.
Claymore indeed. Fixed. I guess I still have Clannad on the mind. Every time I see a picture post over at Jason’s, I’m wondering if I made another mistake, by dropping it.
And I’ve seen a few ultra fans saying that they’ll buy True Tears even at that price. Ol’ P.T. was right, there’s one born every minute. If Bandai, is extremely lucky, the buyers for the big box stores won’t realize what’s coming and will purchase normal amounts, so their first few titles will seem to be selling relatively ok. Once the retail figures and word on dead shelf space gets back to the corporate buyers though…. I give it about six to nine months, and then there will be a steep drop in wholesale volumes purchased, translating into who knows what in about a year and a half.
If wholesale volumes plummet immediately because the buyers are in tune with niche markets and know what will happen, then Bandai will see the drop immediately.
I’m sure sales won’t be exactly zero. They’ll sell a few. But they’re not going to sell damned many.
Right now, the big box stores won’t even consider carrying BVUSA’s releases because they have no retail distribution. Even if they were to get a distributor, the $40 price point would scare off most buyers, never mind the episode count; Funimation tried charging $40 for single volumes of Fruits Basket, and those didn’t sell so well, even at 7 episodes per disc of a popular series.
“But they’re not going to sell damned many.”
Oh yeah. Considering that a lot of people think that $50 is too much to buy a series, getting only 2(?) episodes for $40 bucks seems suicidal.