Sidenote: Not All PSN Anime Is Crazy Expensive
I was just fooling around a bit more with the new Playstation Network VOD stuff and decided to buy myself an episode of AstroBoy.
I know a lot of people are unhappy with the price of Bounen no Xamdou– $2.99-$3.99 for a 24-hour rental that must take place within 2 weeks, for a single episode –but I wanted to make sure no one was writing off the PSN VOD entirely, or even just as a possibility for anime.
AstroBoy episodes appear to be download-to-own (or at least aren’t marked as rentals) and are $1.99 an episode. I don’t know if the DRM is the same, or even how to check that sort of thing (short, I suppose, of actually sitting here for an hour and trying to transfer it around to as many devices as I can), but I’d guess that it is. Still, a better price, no?
That said…I’ve expressed this in a couple of places but I wanted to share it here too. If you’re interested in Xamdou, I highly recommend going ahead and paying for the first episode, even if it’s more than you’d usually pay for that sort of rental. Why? Because it signals to Sony and BONES that we’re interested in it.
I just think that if they get moderate success with this system then I think we’re more likely to experiment with different pricing structures than if it fails outright. I can understand not wanting to pay prices akin to DVD costs for a mere rental for the entire series, but I think a show of support for this first episode would help express the idea that “you’re taking a step in the right direction, even if you haven’t hit exactly what we want yet.”
Just a thought.
Tags: bounen no xamdou, editorials, playstation network, ps3
July 17th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Supporting Sony’s pricing on this download is like supporting Bandai Visual USA’s pricing on their DVD releases. It’s not about them being forward-thinking or anything like that, it’s about them ignoring the actual market out there and the audiance that they’re trying to reach out to.
The standard set by Funimation (and other American companies) is $2 per each download-to-own SD episode. They established that over a year ago, and they are even trying to improve on that with their Youtube deal.
I can understand Sony wanting to charge more for their HD content, but to have a $3 minimum barrier-to-entry is 50% higher than the current standard… and they even impose a strict time limit on it! Again, how is this not like BVU’s high prices for less content strategy?
This is pricing that you would give to a stand-only 2 hour long movie rental, not a 25 minute single anime episode. It’s an insult to the fans who want to get into the legal digital market, and it’s an insult for the folks at Funimation for standardizing a pricing strategy that is actually profitable for them.
You don’t always have to get it right the first time, but at least take the time to look around to see what everyone else is doing. Sony is showing that same kind of arrogance and ignorance to the anime market as they have been showing to the video game market.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I disagree, Scott: Bandai Visual USA entered a market that already had a fairly set range of prices. VOD for anime has some set prices– for series that have already been available for ages, generally. (Exception being Death Note, and one series does not a standard make.)
The timing matters here– some would argue the timing is EVERYthing. As such, the ONLY shows that could compare to Bounen no Xamdou are the three Gonzo releases– two of which had very experimental pricing structures.
So this is a big first step for BONES and Aniplex. SCEA, who isn’t always very cozy with Sony Japan, probably had to do some serious negotiating to release Xamdou in the US at all. Given what I’m told by reps from ALL of the US anime companies, I’m inclined to bet that it’s the Japanese companies that insisted on this particular pricing structure– and that THEY are the ones ignoring what the VOD/anime market is doing in the US, seeing as that’s what they tend to do.
If SCEA went to bat to get us Xamdou, I really think supporting even one episode will make them more likely to try hard for similar stuff in the future– and give them more bargaining power to do so. (”We made $x much off of Xamdou, which was okay. But if we release it like THIS, we estimate we would have made 3x!” etc).
But if it doesn’t make diddly? Sony Japan and other Japanese anime companies will probably continue to write off the US market as not worth their time.
I dunno about you, but I think that the possibility of that first scenario is worth my $4.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
They can’t get away with selling expensive downloads with heavy DRM restrictions towards an audiance who is used to getting all their anime for free. The purpose of legitimate download services is to make an easy and affordable alternative to downloading illegally. Having a 14-week / 24-hour viewing window is insane! I’m not going to pay $4 to be forced to watch my content in one sitting sometime in the next two weeks.
I bought Funimation’s Tsukuyomi -Moon Phase- series a year ago off of iTunes but never finished watching it. I’m picking off where left off recently, and I can still watch it even a year after I bought it. I started watching one episode last night, but I got side tracked and never finished it. But you know what? I can finish watching that episode tonight… or tomorrow… or a year from now! And I only had to pay $1.35 for that episode.
My money is going to continue to go to Funimation’s download services. And so what if it’s brand new anime? Tsukuyomi is just as new to me right now as it would have been when it first came out in Japan.
SCEA is so full of it if they think I’m going to give up that freedom just for something new. If they can’t even convince me, the dude who doesn’t like fansubbing, to go with their legit strategy, how are they going to convince the real fansubbing viewers to go along with it?
July 17th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Scott, my point is– once again –not that things couldn’t be a lot better or that the company shouldn’t have done things differently.
My points are two-fold:
1) It’s narrow-minded and over-simplifying to assume that SCEA has total control over how this release was offered– and a disservice to your and my readers, I think, to suggest otherwise.
In all likelihood there are as many as 40 companies involved in Xamdou and its US release, ALL of whom have to be appeased or the release simply doesn’t happen– and most of whom are based in Japan, where most companies are refusing to look at how things are here. Against all that, is it that hard to imagine that SCEA’s ideas on pricing structure might have simply been overridden? So I highly recommend that you quit spreading the idea that everything is SCEA’s fault– it easily could have been a case of this pricing structure or else no Xamdou on PSN at all. Maybe you think that’d be better, but I’m always glad to see companies at least try, even if they don’t get it right at first.
2) That all said, the situation is still what it is, even if we’d like it to be different. It being that the situation isn’t likely to change in the immediate future, I offered my personal opinion on what fans should do if they want things to improve over the long run.
Because frankly, running around spewing about how the companies involved “suck” or are “full of it” or how the people involved in them are “idiots” is really not productive– for the companies OR the fans.
July 17th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Xam’d has an unique release situation and I think the lack of download-to-own option is due to the Japanese being super paranoid about its eventual Japanese release.
I further think Scott’s example is just ludicrous. VOD is OD–ON DEMAND. It makes no sense from a consumer’s perspective to encourage a price structure that encourage people downloading it to watch 6 months later. Just download the episode when you want to watch it? And again, I agree with Gia that the price of VOD stuff is not set in stone. The effect of charging an extra $2 per episode is unclear given all the other bonuses of watching Xam’d.
All I’m saying is considering Xam’d is a totally exclusive anime to PSN, considering it’s a serious business production, and considering it is in HD, the price tag is not unreasonable.
What I hate is the DRM and 24 hour watch period. Even for a rental that is too, too short. They need to give us some slack and make a smaller encode because if something screws up it can easily make a mess of someone’s $4. I think that really detracts from the value of the deal. Something like 3 days maybe? The 14-day window is fine though.