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.”
Let’s see…from BONES we have Xamdou already up– phenomenally, since it doesn’t even have a release date beyond “2008″ on Moon Phase –and then there’s the FUNimation titles:
Afro Samurai
Basilisk
Burst Angel
Desert Punk
Gunslinger Girl
Kiddy Grade
Moon Phase
Samurai 7
Trinity Blood
Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles
And Sony itself has a single offering: Astro Boy.
Me, I’m nabbing the first episode of Xamdou (or Xam’d, as it’s being called…makes me think of Punk’d). I’m getting the low-res version for $2.99, which is viewable for up to 14 days– that’s right, it’s rental, not download-to-own. The SD version is 400mb, btw, and omonomono mentioned in the comments that the HD version is 1500mb. Ouch.
Missed it, so you guys can thank ANN for this one: apparently I was so busy looking for FUNimation’s name in the press release that I completely missed this:
Additionally, SCEI will be introducing original exclusive content such as Xam’d: Lost Memories, an anime series developed by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, delivered in SD and HD.
For those of you keeping track at home, that’s Bounen no Xamdou, the newest BONES project– a “nostalgic sci-fi,” they call it. I just caught the trailer that’s already up on the PSN and it looks awesome. For those of you with no PS3 of your own, that’s the same trailer up at the top of this article, so enjoy.
Now the question, of course, is whether Xamdou will be offered up simultaneous with its Japanese release or sometime thereafter, and whether it’ll be a dub or sub release. The trailer has no dialogue at all, so no hints there.
How many times can I get away with reusing this logo?
Well, it was cool to see FUNimation’s name up with Lionsgate, MGM, 20th Century Fox and the like earlier, and those of you who wanted more technical details can get them over at the press release on the official Playstation site. But as anime fans, you might notice that the list of companies involved is a little different than the one announced at the convention.
For example, Warner Bros. is on that list. And Disney. But FUNimation isn’t. Which is a shame, because with the sheer volume of content they’ve gotten access to lately– and the popularity of some of those titles –they really deserve the mention, at least in my opinion. Though I’m a little biased, I guess. And at least they DID get mentioned in the live announcement at E3, which is cool.
Still, how the heck long do I have to wait to figure out what shows FUNimation is putting online?
