Picture Perfect Paranoia

Well, who knew that the anime industry is going through shittier times than prior to the Fansub Era?

What the Japanese media companies are experiencing right now could draw comparisons from the fact that newspaper printings are going digital. That available content can now be found on the Web, as opposed to strictly on print. The change could be slightly drastic, and some companies are taking a hard-line approach to stemming the flow of goods going off the shelves and onto the price listings on the Internet.

Sigh.

When I started immersing myself into anime, the whole industry wasn’t this hesitant in providing fansub groups with leeway to distribute their titles, acting as a sort of middleman between the consumers (that means us) and the producers (distributing companies, animators, artists, etc.). With the advent of the Internet as a distributing medium, this creates an upset in the balance, and now the producers are struggling to recapture their target, now fully or partially realizing the benefits of bypassing this conduit in favor of more accessible, less costly, and thus less restrictive means of obtaining content they are in favor of.

As fellow blogger Nagi now cites:

With the failure of major player Geneon earlier this year and the recent increased Japanese hostility towards fansubs, the future of anime both here and abroad has been a much discussed topic of late, with many greatly differing opinions.

…

It gets worse when the original Japanese rights holders horn in on things and constantly try to push the domestic markets to charge even more for anime to bring the rest of the world in line with their own absurd pricing policies, and prevent Japanese citizens from importing the cheaper foreign anime DVDs to circumvent their own native country’s horrendous practices. It’s bad enough that the Japanese charge domestic licensers two arms and three legs just to make this stuff available to us at all and effectively started this entire mess, but it seems they just won’t be satisfied until they’ve completely changed our market to match theirs and make us pay as much as every starving otaku and hikkomori. It’s now becoming an undisputed fact: prices rising sky high does not correlate with the high demand for anime merchandise and paraphernalia. And it’s this problem that has become the subject of much discussion.

Hopefully, the local industry (that means both in Japan and elsewhere) realizes the kinks in this setup, for the betterment of both them and us.

…at least that’s what I think where the problem lies. If anyone can offer some comments or suggestions concerning this issue, feel free to inform me.