I didn’t follow AX day by day, mainly thanks to being out of town over the weekend, but I did want to review things that had gotten licensed.

The headline news for me as the announcement by Sentai Filmworks (aka ADV reincarnated) to license both ef series. Those had been hanging out there for a while, and I was really doubting whether they would ever be licensed, but Sentai decided to pick them up. ef – a tale of memories was a 12 episode series that aired in 2007, while it’s followup, ef – a tale of melodies, was a 12 episode series that aired in 2008.  You can read my blogging of both of my series here. Sentai Filmworks also licensed Loups-Garous, a 2010 movie, and Ro-Kyu-Bu, which started airing in Japan on July 1st.

The other semi-interesting licensing announcement for me was NIS America licensing Kimi ni Todoke, though it appears to only be the first season so far.  Kimi ni Todoke was a 25 episode series that aired in the Fall of 2009 and Winter of 2010.  NIS America also licensed the series Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera, which is a 12 episode series that just completed airing in Japan.

In other announcements:

• Bandai Entertainment licensed Sacred Seven, which started airing July 2nd, and will stream it on Hulu and Crunchyroll
• Viz licensed the Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva movie released in 2009 and the Bleach: Fade to Black – Kimi no Na o Yobu movie, released in 2008
• Aniplex USA licensed Madoka Magica, a 12 episode series that aired earlier this year, and Blue Exorcist, a 24 episode series currently airing in Japan.
• Funimation licensed Deadman Wonderland, a 12 episode series that just concluded airing in Japan; Steins;Gate, a 24 episode series currently airing in Japan; Baka and Test 2, which will start airing in Japan July 7th; B Gata H Kei, a 12 episode series that aired in 2010; and Asobi ni Ikuyo, another 12 episode series that aired in 2010.

It started with what I initially thought was a Dilbert comic come tragically to life before quickly shifting into a case of manufactured dorama for publicity before turning into a case of “Anime is Serious Business”. I’m speaking, of course, about the events involving Funimation over the last week-and-a-half; if you’ve missed the story so far, check out here, here, and here from ANN – the most trusted name in anime news (except when they themselves screw something up) – before reading further.

I’m typically too busy actually enjoying anime to bother writing about anime “piracy” by Americans when it’s always the same old arguments anyways. I’d’ve passed this story over without commenting until I read this entry on Funimation’s blog and realized I did have something I can add to this debate.

Mr. Heiskell made the case for the importance of territorial rights in ensuring the efficient delivery of anime around the world. The big problem in this argument is that it relies on an assumption that is so prevalent in America that I can’t really blame Mr. Heiskell in making it. The truth is that North America is not the center of the English-speaking anime fandom population; it’s not even the majority. This truth would have greatly shocked me several years ago when I was just a very casual anime fan. Even when I started visiting anime blogs and forums, I would have still been surprised that what I thought was a sizable minority of fans living outside of North America was actually the majority. I didn’t realize this truth until I started anime blogging myself and decided I was curious about which far-off countries people came from to visit The Null Set.

North America didn’t make up 75% of my audience like I thought it would; that number was consistently in the 35 – 40% range. If I extend it out to all English as the first language countries, I’m still short of a majority. I embedded a second tracker to see if the results I got were in error and the second tracker yielded almost exactly the same results. I found this to be a much cooler result because that meant I got to interact with tons of people living from a diverse set of backgrounds from around the globe without trying to learn a myriad of foreign languages (3 years of Spanish in high school taught me that I suck at learning a foreign language).

Up until now I’ve only used this knowledge when I’m thinking about the audience I’m writing to; for example, it’s easier for me to not write about politics when I know roughly 2 out 3 readers will not care because they live in a different country than me. However, this fact greatly influences the environment surrounding Mr. Heiskell’s argument and the recent events connected to Funimation.

I realize it was possible that my blog was atypical so for this post I decided to examine other anime blogs to see if this pattern would hold up. I found three other blogs that linked to the information I needed – one was a much more popular blog then mine, the second one is about the same size as mine and the third one is a blog that’s gone dormant but still gets a fair amount of traffic. All three blogs displayed a very similar pattern to mine; which I’ve averaged and will summarize now.

The Top 10 Readerships of English Language Anime Blogs by Country:

The North American share (US and Canada) is only 38.1%, the UK and Australia add another 6.9% for a total of 45.0%. That means 55.0% of the market for English language anime comes from countries that don’t speak English as a first language and it’s not just a few countries that make up that 55% as the next table shows.

Readerships of English Language Anime Blogs

If you apply this knowledge to Mr. Heiskell’s argument, it quickly becomes apparent why licensing anime titles by country/territory is never going to work. There are just too many countries to cover and there’s also the question of offering English dubbed/subbed anime in countries like France, Germany, Brazil and Malaysia where there might already be a native language anime publisher that might not take kindly to an outside company poaching fans.

Then again, the nature of the internet makes thinking about problems using physical geography seem very antiquated and doomed to failure. A much better approach would be by language since that’s closer to how the internet is actually split-up. It would be a titanic shift from how it’s done now which means as long as the old ways make money, new methods will not be tested. Which makes it sound like it’s up to the anime “pirates” – once again – to get these obsolete business practices eliminated and get better ones put into place. After all, it was anime “pirates” that have historically driven the advancement and innovation of offering anime/manga from creating the market to pushing publishers into releasing anime by the box set and to offer anime online. (I’ve yet to come across a piracy-hating anime fan that wishes companies would go back offering anime a couple of episodes at time for ~$25 or wanting them to stop streaming anime online.)

Looking at the breakdown of where the fans actually live that would be interested in English language anime also shows why streaming anime (by territory) will only have a limited impact on anime “piracy”. That’s not to say streaming anime hasn’t cut down on anime “piracy” but there is just so much Funimation can do when they only control 38.1% of the market. Proof of this, I believe, appears in the documents that Funimation filed to sue 1337 downloaders of episode 481 of One Piece subbed by yibis.

The number 1337 is not just a random number to internet users which lead me, and just about everyone else, to believe Funimation picked that number of people to sue on purpose. I initially assumed that Funimation could have sued many, many more but stopped at that number but a funny thing happened when I looked over the people Funimation was suing. I saw a great number of obvious duplicates. For example, the very first person, “Doe 1”, was identified as using Verizon Internet Services to download the episode in question at 1/9/11 3:27 AM with the IP of 71.172.24.89. The second person on the list, “Doe 2”, was identified using Verizon Internet Services to download the episode in question at 1/9/11 3:33 AM with the IP of 71.172.24.89. This is obviously the same person which got me curious, how many duplicates where there?

To answer that question took much more work then I initially thought. I attempted to copy the information in the 32 page PDF into a text document so I could import that into MS Excel but that proved impossible; even though the text was selectable and copyable in the PDF, I just got gibberish when I pasted it in WordPad, MS Word and Excel. I ended up having to turn each page of the PDF into a picture file and then use Acrobat’s ability to convert the picture file back into a document with selectable text, copying that into Excel and checking that no errors were made in this circuitous method.

Now that I had an Excel spreadsheet, the answer was very quick to find; I found 255 “Does” that appear to be duplicates. A quick check of the torrent in question, since Funimation doesn’t seem to want to take down the actual torrent file, shows that it’s been downloaded nearly 23,000 times. Why have 255 duplicates if there were plenty of people to sue?

The only answer that makes sense to me is that there aren’t 1337 people living in North America that illegally downloaded this episode of One Piece for Funimation to sue. This thought allows for a few interesting calculations. If the 255 duplicates are subtracted from the initial 1337 people, that leaves only 1082 people who had access to the Funimation stream that choose to download a fansub instead (which was a 720p fansub btw). Next, I don’t know the exact number of people out of the 23,000 that downloaded the episode in the first four days (which is the length of time covered by the 1337 names) but I’m going to assume the number was probably around 20,000 – based on how frontloaded torrents are. This means that just 5.4% of the people downloading this episode of One Piece lived in an area where they had access to Funimation’s free stream.

If we use the North American share of the English anime market that I calculated above, 38.1%, then seeing the share of North American downloaders at only 5.4% says to me that free streaming anime has significantly decreased the amount of “piracy” by North American anime fans. If Funimation would include some sort of download-to-own option for those that don’t like streaming or have computers that don’t do streaming well and throw 720p into the mix then they could shrink that number down even more. (Off the cuff, maybe offer streaming 720p for a small price and downloads at 360p for $1 per episode or 12 episodes for $10 dollars and 720p at $2 – $3 per episode or 12 episodes for $20 – $30 dollars.)

Looking at this list of “Does” was interesting in other ways. The top ISP’s of the offenders looked like this:

College students didn’t appear to be a problem at all; out of the 1082 actual “Does”, only 2 each came from The Pennsylvania State University and the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with 1 each coming from Ohio State University, Northeastern University and the California Institute of Technology. For a total of 7 “Does” or 0.6% of the total.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious where my sympathies lie but I can’t find myself mustering much anger towards Funimation like I have in the past for the MPAA and RIAA. I think it’s because Funimation is getting ground up between the incompatible wishes of the Japanese licensers and those of the anime fans from around the world and yet Funimation is still trying their absolute best. (Hence the picture at the top.) As such, I think this lawsuit that Funimation brought forth was the price they had to pay to get the stream of Fractale back – saying sorry and promising to do better next time wasn’t going to cut it a second time.

I say “price to pay” because I think Funimation knows this lawsuit is a bad idea all around. The RIAA gave up on their large-scale suing of normal consumers a couple of years ago because the lawsuits cost the record industry millions of dollars, were very bad publicity and galvanized people into continuing to download music illegally (no one likes a bully). No matter the thinking behind it, every dollar spent by Funimation on this lawsuit is a dollar that will now go to a lawyer and his/her quest for another new sports car/yacht/mansion instead of helping “support the industry” as the consumers buying a Funimation item most likely wanted.

I’m tempted at this point to launch into a discussion about how to fix anime but I’m already 2000 words into this post and I don’t want to muddle the central point – North America is not the center of English language anime fandom and thus any decision about anime distribution that doesn’t take this into account is practically doomed to failure from the very beginning.

This afternoon, Right Stuf International announced that they had licensed the anime series El Hazard: The Wanderers.  In addition, as opposed to some more recent Right Stuf announcements, El Hazard will be receiving a dub, per the website.  Right Stuff is releasing it in a single 26-episode box set on September 7th.  El Hazard was originally aired between October 1995 and March 1996.

Meanwhile, this past weekend, Funimation announced several new acquisitions, including:

• Rosario + Vampire (both seasons)
• Chaos;HEAd
• Chrome Shelled Regios
• Rideback
• Heaven’s Lost Property (Sora no Otoshimono), and
• GUNxSWORD

GUNxSWORD and Regios will be released late in 2010, while everything else is slated for release sometime in 2011.

Edit: El Hazard is apparently a rescue from Geneon, not an entirely new acquisition.

With the timing of Al Gore and the intelligence of Joe Biden, the recent rant by Bang Zoom’s President about the impending death of anime is so sad, it’s hilarious. If it was a well-written piece I might feel like I needed to write a rebuttal but it wasn’t, not by a long shot, which leads one to ask – “Why are you bringing up Mr. Sherman’s rambling rant?” Well, I’d answer, there are some things I wanted to mention related to issue at hand and this is as good of a time as any.

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Where I Blame Mr. Sherman and Bang Zoom For Being 35% of the Problem Facing Anime In America

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I bought an anime DVD the other day.

Not a big surprise; I, like many people can be enticed to buy something even if we have access to it for free. That goes for my copy of the latest Dresden Files book and it goes for this DVD. What is this mysterious anime DVD that I, as a member of the dark underbelly of the internet bought? The complete box set of Baccano.

The big surprise to this purchase is that I bought the complete box set of Baccano for it’s dub. That’s right, I bought an anime DVD for it’s dub. Crazy, I know. Even more crazy when you start listing all the awesome Japanese voice work done for this series but here I am, giddy in anticipation over watching an anime dub.

Someone well acquainted with the past dub quality in anime might ask what makes this dub different from the years and years of mediocre dubs that American fans have had to put up with? Simply put, Funimation used voice actors that sounded right for their role, had genuine talent, and the drive to give a performance on par with their Japanese counterparts. I wouldn’t think it was possible but Funimation did it and if you don’t believe me, you can go to their website to watch the dub episodes for free.

Fine, someone might now say, why does a sublime dub convince me to buy the DVD? Another simple question , Baccano’s dub gives the DVD a much higher value in my eyes then a sub-only DVD or a lousy dub DVD would. For instance, I can now watch Baccano even when it’s not possible to read subs all the time like while I’m cooking or cleaning or eating or, in the case of my sister, when she wants to do a bit of knitting. Also, most Americans don’t like to read subs so having a quality dub of Baccano means I have an anime to show those people when I want to convince them that anime can be awesome (without having to worry about the voice acting souring my chances with these potential converts).

I can hear the question coming at this point – what does Baccano’s dub have to do with Bang Zoom and the problems facing anime in America. At the time of reading Mr. Sherman’s rant I knew Bang Zoom was a dubbing studio but I didn’t know of what shows so I went to the ever informative Anime News Network. And according to ANN, Bang Zoom had nothing to do with the Baccano dub but they did do the Haruhi (my #1 top anime of 2006), Lucky Star (my #2 top anime of 2007), and Gurren Lagann (my #1 top anime of 2007) dubs.  A light bulb clicks on at this point. I have the limited edition Haruhi DVDs and found the dub just slightly better then mediocre; Haruhi’s English voice actor totally failed to make Haruhi as awesome as Aya Hirano was able too and the whole show comes off as a much lower quality show because of it. I saw the trailer to Lucky Star and was so turned off by the dub that I refused to even consider paying money for such an inferior product. In the case of Gurren Lagann, I watched it dubbed on the Sci-fi channel and was so infuriated when a poorly picked English voice for Kamina was able to completely change his character for the worse.

In all three shows I sensed a common theme – Bang Zoom pumping out a mediocre dub which might have saved a couple bucks but hurt the show in the long run. Consider what an anime DVD is worth if the dub track will never be listened to and watching it subbed means putting up with that ugly yellow font and poor handling of signs and watching it as a DVD means having to settle for the resolution a DVD offers? Even Mr. Sherman must know, in his heart-of-hearts, that an anime DVD like that isn’t worth very much. If, however, that same DVD offered a great dub then it’s worth would be much higher and as a result, more DVDs would be sold because the consumers would be able to get something they like in return for spending money that could have gone to a dozen different diversions and hobbies.

As I looked at it more the more I became convinced that Bang Zoom and Mr. Sherman have been more detrimental to anime in America then fansubs have ever been. Consider the anime companies Mr. Sherman mentions in his rant as having closed or suffered massive trouble. Two of those four companies (Bandai and Geneon/Pioneer) use/used Bang Zoom extensively to do their dubs – coincidence? Could it be, those market forces of capitalism that work in so many other industries to keep prices down and quality up have shown up here as well? Could it be, American consumers aren’t quiet the dumb sheep that people like Mr. Sherman think they are?

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Where I Show Mr. Sherman’s Statement That Japan Is “struggling to bring out quality titles” As Another Symptom of The Problem Facing Anime In America

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Assuming, of course, Mr. Sherman wasn’t lying through his teeth and he knows that Japan isn’t struggling to bring out quality titles. Which is a possibility but if one looks at what types of shows that generally get licensed and brought over then his statement fits into an idea I have.

I was looking at the those wonderful charts that chartfag has been putting together and I noticed something when I compared the 2008 chart with the 2001 chart. Here’s the charts, can you see it too?

If you look at the 2001 chart, it looks like the TV stations and animators where targeting young boys with the overwhelming majority shows being action shounen shows and the secondary market seemed to be young girls with the cute shoujo shows. Now look at the 2008 chart and something strange has happened. There’s still those action shounen shows and cute shoujo shows but there’s all these new types of shows: Aria, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Spice and Wolf, Natsume Yuujinchou, Hidemari Sketch, Clannad, Natsu no Sora, and Kaiba to name just a few.

It’s almost like the audience watching anime in Japan is diversifying and getting older; shocking, I know. A look at the American anime market shows that, for the most part, it’s still a 2001 mindset. It’s very slowly getting better (thanks in part to fans refusing to accept business as usual from the DVD companies) but there’s still a wide gulf between how shows like Bleach and Naruto are treated in America as opposed to how Natsume Yuujinchou, Clannad, or Aria are. What must American anime company people like Mr. Sherman think when they see shows like Bakemonogatari as being top DVD/Blu-Ray sellers in Japan? Their years and years of relying and pushing action shounen titles must make it so they can’t comprehend how a show that’s hyper-stylized and spends all it’s time showing characters talking could ever possibly sell in America.

So these American anime companies pass on shows like Bakemonogatari and wait for the next Naruto and complain that fansubs are killing anime because their waiting for the next Naruto obviously means something is wrong with anime. The funny thing is they might be right about the difficulty in their ability to sell shows like Bakemonogatari to America but let’s remember that it’s these same company executive’s limited mindset that has stunted the ability for the mainstream anime fandom in America to grow with their Japanese counterparts, causing a near incompatibility between the two.

To further compound this problem, American anime companies sticking to a 2001 mindset also cause yet more problems. People, including anime fans, get bored of watching the same type of shows over-and-over again; look at the cyclical nature to American prime-time television as a great example of this. So what do these bored anime fans do when they get tired of watching anime that bores them? Either become former anime fans or head to the dark, dangerous underbelly of the internet and find all the titles they’ve been missing out on. And even if you can find anime fans that don’t tire of watching the same type of show over-and-over, by watching only those action shounen titles targeted towards the younger audience it’s very probable that these anime fans will decide one day that they’ve “outgrown” anime because it’s meant for kids and, unless someone steps in and shows them the wider possibilities found in anime, they will stop being anime fans.

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Where I Mention Another Market That Alarmists Have Said Will Die “If Something Isn’t Done!”

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Print science fiction. Except in the case of print SF, people have prognosticated it’s immanent death since at least the early 1980’s. Hasn’t happened yet and it probably never will, provided great SF books/stories are still being written. So, I put little stock in any statement about the immanent death of anime as long as great anime is still being made and a quick look shows that plenty of quality anime is still getting made.

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Where I Remind Mr. Sherman the Easiest Way To Get Rid Fansubs Is To Put Out a Superior Product

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I asked earlier how much is a DVD worth if the dub track will never be listened to and watching it subbed means putting up with that ugly yellow font and poor handling of signs and watching it as a DVD means having to settle for the resolution a DVD offers. The answer is not very much and it looks even sadder when compared to the standard fansub I can find in the dark recesses of the internet put out by unpaid amateurs.

If anime companies in America can come up with a better way to give anime fans their anime then fansubs would go the way of the horse & buggy, the record/8-track players, the canals, the walkie-talkies and the elevator operators. Until that happens though, the anime companies in America will be the ones in danger of disappearing and not fansubs.

And will anime die if every single American anime company shuts down? To answer, I’ll first have to assume this scenario is possible because if anime is anything like print SF then as companies close down, new people with new ideas start new companies and pick up where the old companies left off and there’s never a point when somebody isn’t producing anime/manga/ print SF. So, assuming this worst case scenario, would anime die if every single American anime company shuts down? I’d have to say no, I don’t think so.

For all the bluster that Mr. Sherman displays in his rant – America don’t actually make the anime, we’re only a secondary market to Japan. If we were truly important to them then we’d be able to leverage better treatment from them. Remember how in the case of Haruhi the overwhelming amount of fans in America wanted the DVDs released in TV order and the Japanese license holder would only allow the TV order as an “extra” for the limited edition DVDs and only as a subtitled release. Or the continued reluctance of the Japanese rights holders in allowing us Americans to release anime Blu-ray discs. They couldn’t let the remote possibility of reverse importation mess-up their true cash cow even if that makes fansubs all the more enticing to everyone else.

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Where I Write a Conclusion and Hope Someone Has Read This Entire 2300+ Word Blog Entry and Derived Something Positive From It

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Let’s Recap: Mr. Sherman, President and CEO of the dubbing studio Bang Zoom writes a rant about the impending death of anime and I find it funny for being so out-of-touch with reality. It didn’t rate a response until I realized this was a chance to talk about how unexpectantly awesome the Baccano dub was (thanks Funimation!) and to snub Bang Zoom for screwing up three recent great anime shows by providing poor to slightly better then mediocre dubs and to talk about how the worth of an anime DVD changes drastically depending on the quality of it’s dub. I also realize that I can take this opportunity to voice my displeasure about the history of licensing only certain types of shows for America and to point out how these studio executives are too short-sighted and/or dumb to realize the consequences of their licensing patterns. And I realized I can mention what I think about all these Chicken Littles who want to make us believe the sky is falling and also to remind Mr. Sherman (who probably won’t actually ever read this post) that the surest way to get rid of a product is to produce a superior product and watch capitalism work it’s magic and let the inferior product disappear.

So after realizing all this, I got to writing this blog entry and here we are, a dozen hours of writing from me and 2300+ words written. I hope at least one person out there enjoyed this post and got something from it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some anime to watch.

Funimation has announced that they have licensed the anime series Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji). Black Butler is a 24 episode series that aired between October 2008 and March 2009, and was produced by A-1 Pictures and Aniplex.

A second season is scheduled to start airing in July.