Annual ‘State of the Anime Industry’ panel held at 2008 NY Anime Fest
I won’t bother re-iterating everything that was said at this year’s ‘State of the Anime Industry’ panel, especially since Toon Zone did such a bang-up job of summarizing it, but I would be remiss in not mentioning some of the high points.
Overall, the anime biz is not headed over a waterfall, but there is still much work to be done to re-vamp the business model in order to bring the industry back to pre-crash levels. Online access (read: ‘piracy’) has definitely had an effect, but as has been stated many times before, this level of fan interest can be harnessed to the distributor’s advantage if they’re clever and open to re-assessing old business models.
Here’s a snippet:
It’s no secret that CD and DVD sales in the United States have been dropping of late, and Kelts pointed out that anime has been especially hard-hit by the loss in sales. However, anime’s popularity has been rising, with conventions breaking attendance records almost every weekend — a fact reinforced by Sheehan, who said that 25% of the attendees of the FUNimation panel said it was their first anime convention. Kelts began the panel by asking the participants what they were doing in response to the loss of home video sales. Iyadomi pointed out that anime companies spent years developing a market for selling anime TV series on single-volume DVDs, only to be undermined when American companies started selling entire seasons of TV shows on DVD. This left them caught between a market that was rejecting single-volume discs for season sets and licensors who are still highly resistant to the idea of selling entire seasons of TV at once. Bandai has been trying to balance between price point and content that can still be profitable, like shipping 13-episode products in 2 disc sets.
Read the whole shebang here.
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