Are Simulcasts Affecting English Home Video Releases?

It never occurred to me before, but, while I’m buying a lot more anime than I used to, in about a year or two, I’ll be buying less. Not because I’m watching less, but because I’m watching more. There are shows like Fractale, which I would have definitely bought if I had only seen the premise and not given the option of watching it now as a simulcast. After seeing the series, I would definitely pick it up for $20, but not the $40+ they’re asking for it now.

Then there are shows like Excel Saga and Black Butler, which I pick up on a whim because they look cool or I’ve heard high praise about them and they’re on sale. Those I’m sometimes disappointed by (in my collection, Excel Saga, Now and Then, Here and There, and Rin were all ok, but I wasn’t blown away by them and I’m not sure they were worth the price I paid). Most, I do end up sticking with and enjoying, but when I see them at Half-Price Books for under $20, I sometimes can’t resist (I’ve still got Macross Plus, Metropolis, and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence sitting on my computer waiting to be watched with more anime coming; yeep).

But those are all older titles. What about the newer titles? What about shows like Upotte!, Saki, Phi Brain, Knight in the Area, and Kimi to Boku? Those are all simulcasts that I’m enjoying to varying degrees (Upotte! is at the bottom), but I wouldn’t consider buying those unless they hit the Funimation S.A.V.E. line for $15 or something. And that’s at least three or four years down the road, maybe more.

Don’t get me wrong, LEGAL simulcasts are the best thing that’s happened to the anime industry, arguably. It’s introducing way more fans to anime than could ever be achieved by just home video sales. Rental stores don’t have them anymore and places like Best Buy and Target sell anime for near MSRP, so it’s just not worth it unless you go through Amazon or Right Stuf and bargain hunt (unless you’re a collector, like me. Then you’re tugged into buying Madoka Magica four episodes at a time for $80 per set).

So what legal streaming is really doing is pushing anime fans that just want to watch something once and then be done with it out of the home video market. Before, they might buy titles like Cowboy Bebop or Fullmetal Alchemist; but now, they can just check those shows out at Crunchyroll if they actually do want to watch them again. And Crunchyroll’s subs go back to 2009 simulcasts—three years ago now.

Older titles like Neon Genesis Evangelion, titles that Funimation or another home video anime licensor simulcasts, and classics that are being license saved are still going to see big home video releases and they’ll still see a big home video market because the target audience for those are now older and can afford to buy the box sets. But Crunchyroll, while doing something great for the industry, might be hurting it in the long run. We’ve yet to see the full implications of Crunchyroll’s impact on the anime market, and we won’t for another two or three years. It’s offering a lot more than Funimation or Viz or any other licensor can offer: $7/month, $20/3 months, or $60/year and you have crap tons of anime at your fingertips. For $60, you could also buy Oreimo when it first came out. That’s 17 episodes as opposed to the 240 episodes with Crunchyroll’s yearlong subscription, and that’s assuming you watch five simulcasts per season and each simulcast is 13 episodes.

The home video market is still where the money is going to be, with anime or otherwise. But it’s slowly dying out because a lot of the companies, American and Japanese, are unwilling to change the market into something that’ll work with the young people’s wallets. It costs about $35 for one movie nowadays, new. Sure, you get DVD, blu-ray, and digital copy, but the digital copy isn’t DRM-free (or at least has some restrictions on it), DVD is slowly losing to blu-ray, and blu-ray is now too expensive to be viable for the long run. People are just going to rent movies on blu-ray and forget about buying them altogether.

Anime doesn’t have that rental option. Funimation is fixing that by pricing its DVD/blu-ray combo packs just dollars over their former solely DVD releases, which is a smart marketing move. And anime is a collectors market, so they throw Collector’s Edition or Limited Edition on their sets, another smart marketing move. But what’s going to end up working in the future is releases like Oreimo’s, which was a Limited Edition release that have a finite number of DVDs being produced (this marketing strategy ensures no loss for Aniplex since they produced an amount of DVDs that would yield them a satisfy-able return for what they paid for the license and creation of that set). After those DVDs were out, no more Oreimo. Until a year or so later when fans demand, demand, demand more and they can make more money. I don’t see Funimation moving to releasing everything like this but, at the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised nor would I hate them for doing so. It’s a business after all.