Posted on October 30th, 2007 in Kenzan, Miscellaneous by Sasha Kenzan
For those of you who keep close track of the anime industry, you’ll know that there seems to be a bit of a panic afoot, especially after the recent withdrawal from the North American market of Geneon, a home distribution powerhouse with several of the genre’s most popular titles under it’s wing. This was after a deal fell through that would have seen Geneon syncing up with fellow powerhouse ADV Films for distribution of their content. This has sent several into a frenzy, trying to figure out the root of the issue, and some may have found a scapegoat: fansubbing.
For those of you who don’t know what fansubbing is, essentially, it is the translation and overlay of subtitles into episodes, done by fans generally unpaid for their work. Fansubs are usually up as quickly as the day after the show has aired on Japanese television. However, for the quick turnaround of fansubbed material, there is a tradeoff. A viewer of a fansub must accept that there will be times where the translation is poor due to the fluency of the translator, or perhaps warped to fit where the translator wants the story to go. Whenever you watch anything translated, you are at the mercy of the translator. The benefit is that you get to see a show the day after it airs in Japan, and most find that worth the benefit. There are ethical issues with it, of course, but that is the case for any medium.
Still, fansubs of unlicensed shows are hugely popular, and sites such as AnimeSuki have helped spread information about shows that would normally not have gotten the chance to make it over here if it wasn’t for fans clamoring for more. Naruto had nearly 150 episodes completed before it was finally licensed for distribution in North America, and even then fansubs remained popular because the show continued production and is still going strong to this day. Even if production stopped right now on the series and a new episode was released every week, it would still take the United States almost two and a half years to catch up with the episode backlog.
Now, Naruto is an anomaly, as most anime series run for 13 to 26 episodes, but it’s almost unreasonable to tell people that they have to stop watching a series after being 150 episodes in and wait for the American distribution to release the shows they’ve already seen before they can get to the episodes that were fresh three years previous. Once again, ethically, the right thing to do would be to wait for the licensing, but Naruto ran for so long without being licensed that I, personally, was wondering if it would ever be picked up. Most detractors of fansubbing will tell you that people who watch fansubs will just steal the shows anyway, even if they are licensed. I personally believe that if the show is worth watching (and seriously, if you’ve already seen 150 episodes of any show, you’re probably hooked), people will buy it so long as the conditions are fair. How many people buy TV shows on DVD, after all?
Part of the argument for fansubbing is that it lets the fan be in control of what they want to watch, and if you are an American-based fan, you’re not part of what the Japanese distributors are trying to target with their shows until an American-based distribution company picks the show up. It’s a reasonable argument, actually. For example, one of my favorite shows is Ippatsu Kikimusume. Essentially, the main character is trapped in a terrible situation and has to get out of it at the start of every single episode. I can safely say that no company would dare take a chance in bringing this over because A) each episode is only four minutes long and, with only sixteen episodes made, there isn’t a lot to distribute, thus resulting in less money for their return and B) the show is outright sadistic at times. Without fansubbing, I would have never been able to see this show, which is unfortunate because deep down, the show is brilliant.
Now, I’m all for supporting American distributors. There are a lot of people out there that get to enjoy anime at a much broader scale than when I first started watching, and I believe being a fan of something means you should share your enjoyment of the show with others. Downloading region 1 rips of dubbed anime is wrong and that is where the finger should be pointed when it comes to free distribution of content, not at the fansubbing community that, I feel, helped give birth to the American audience in the first place. But here are a couple of handy suggestions for distributors and hopefully, they can help turn things around.
SUGGESTION #1: make releases cheaper to purchase. Most anime volumes are released with a price point of $30 a disc. When you only get four or five episodes per disc, that’s not exactly a great value for your money. When it comes down to my entertainment dollar, if it comes down to a choice between four episodes of an anime series or an entire season of a TV show, which is usually compromised of 24 episodes, well, I’ll be taking the season of the TV show. There is more value for my money involved in that.
On top of the fact that anime is expensive to purchase is that a lot of distribution companies take advantage of early adopters of a series. Why spend $30 a month on four or five episodes of a series for six months when you can be patient and wait until the end of the year and get the whole thing for $50? What is the incentive, aside from making some extra artwork and more space taken up on your DVD shelf? Here’s an idea; you’ve already got the rights distributing the series, why not make a handful of episodes digitally available through, say, iTunes, and then release the entire series all at once for a price point that gives value for your dollar? Which leads me to…
SUGGESTION #2: make more shows available for download, and do it at a fair price. The iTunes business model has proven that there is money in legal distribution of music, movies, TV shows, and so forth. ADV has a version of this up on their webstore, but the prices are, once again, ridiculous for what you get. Why should someone looking for entertainment spend $3.99 (ADV’s price for an episode downloadable from their site) on an episode of a series when they can get two episodes of a TV show for the same price as the one anime episode? I’d say it’d be fair to pricematch what other companies charge for an episode… $2 is a fair price to pay for an episode, I feel. Not only will this encourage more people to try a series out (because really, what do you have to lose by spending $2 on a new show), but if you hook someone, they might buy more episodes of a show and then eventually buy the DVDs if they want the actual hard copy of the show.
SUGGESTION #3: find a way to increase turnaround time. One of the big reasons why fansubs are so popular is that they are out so quickly. The anime industry can’t afford to keep sitting on their hands and hoping that fans will stay loyal to a show in order to capitalize on a show’s popularity. There are many shows which have been out for months at a time in Japan before they are even licensed here in the United States, and even then, there is more time spent waiting before those episodes are ready. The American anime industry needs to find a way to speed up releases to capitalize on a fan’s interest of a show before they start to lose interest.
I really do want to see the anime industry continue to grow and I’d love to see everyone profit from it, but the industry itself needs to realize that it can’t keep waggling it’s finger at people and hoping to shame them into buying more product by telling them that fansubbing is horrible and evil. My suggestions aren’t perfect, but it’d be a positive step for American distributors to realize that it’s not 2001 anymore, and they need to start understanding that fans simply aren’t going to pay huge sums of cash for 90 minutes of entertainment, especially when the market is flooded.