we love samurai gun
Categories: anime, commentary
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Hahahaha. Talk about self-delusional.
Oarr also believes that sewing up U.S. rights early on helps prevent piracy. “They know that we will go after people who are ripping us off. You can’t find a single torrent of Samurai Gun out there.”
Anyone out there actually picked up a copy of Samurai Gun? Zero of the blogs that I currently link to talk about this show. I know exactly how well it is going to sell.
Again, I’m going to point out that ADV licensed Sister Princess because it was popular over fansubs (the old post from AOD’s forum is gone now, unfortunately). My advice? Even though a lot of people pirated songs over Napster, Apple still found a way to make a ton of money by making digital content distribution cheap, fast, and easy. $30 for 4 episodes at 2 months a DVD is neither cheap, fast, nor easy. Think about it. They laughed at Apple when they first announced 99 cent songs… and they gave away a few million songs too… and they’re currently swimming in cash from ITMS and their iPods. So why not 99 cent anime episodes?
EDIT: Here’s a quick cost analysis breakdown.
$25,000 an episode licensing costs.
$5,000 an episode dubbing costs.
$0.50 a gig of bandwidth… this is the rate someone like me would get running a small website. It’ll probably be a ton cheaper for a company that’s going to distribute a lot.
Assume the format is something like MKV with dual audio and subs and maybe H264 encoding. Storage is pretty much free these days, and an episode is only 150 megs.
That’s about 34,000 episodes sold to break even at 99 cents a piece. Can they get 34,000 downloads? Consider: right now Point-Blank is reporting over 50,000 downloads for an episode of Bleach and almost 20,000 downloads for an episode of Shuffle. That’s 1 tracker, and there’s more than just 1 group doing either show and factoring in IRC and newsgroups, the actual download count could be 2x that. Now, if they sell it online, and it’s legit, fast, well-publicized, I don’t see how they can’t hit 30,000 even for a mediocre show like Shuffle, and they’ll definitely more than break even for more popular shows.
(BTW, selling DVDs, they only get about $10 a DVD anyway factoring in manufacturing costs, authoring costs, and Amazon/Best Buy middlemen costs. That’s $2.50 an episode.)
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Maybe not 99 cents, but certainly far less than $10 per ep.
99 cents is unlikely to be technically-feasible unless you’re moving a LOT of episodes (bandwidth and reliable servers aren’t free). That’s not counting licensing. It would certainly be a great way to release a pilot to gauge interest, followed by the release of more reasonably-priced DVDs ($25-$30 or so for a full season).