A recent comment thread on GRSI, plus this bit of news and my experience with this site, has led me to ask myself a question so bleeding obvious that I feel stupid asking it. I’ll stress right now that I’m not a professional computer programmer (why else would I be using a stock WP theme?) and I don’t follow the industry too closely (Omo does some very insightful and in-depth analysis on the subject though) but even so, I do wonder: I’ve noticed a potential solution that would help fans AND make money for the industry…two facts that ought to mean it should’ve been done already. Only it hasn’t.
The current attempt at a solution to the fansub/piracy problem is through the streaming with region-locking and paid subscriptions, i.e. Crunchyroll’s model. I’m not aiming to criticise what CR are doing here: they did great things in giving Eve no Jikan exposure, made last year’s Global Shinkai Day even more special and are so far the only independent site that has made a high-profile attempt to seek the middle ground.
BUT…not every English speaker lives in the US. Yes, there’s only 60 million of us on this damp little rock, but there are fans here. And elsewhere. Region locking is a pain, but unless the contracts between CR and the Japanese licence-holders change, I suppose that issue will stay with us for a while yet. They also dropped the DTO service for reasons that I sadly can’t recall, and don’t offer as much HD content as I’d like either.
Above all other points I make in this post, I firmly believe that the fansubs debate would move forward if the fans/fansubbers and the licence-holders/distributors talked more and eyed one another with suspicion less. Studios don’t want to deliberately piss their viewers off, and fans don’t want to see the film-makers and actors they admire out of work. There IS a compromise here somewhere – I’m strangely optimistic about that.
What would I ask for in an anime streaming/downloading site? If it’s a series or movie I really, really like I’d want a DVD/Blu-Ray so this post isn’t about DVD/BD piracy, or issues associated with packaged media and licencing/distribution thereof. For ‘casual’ viewing, I’d want to watch it like I’d watch an ordinary anime show: being able to see it subtitled every week.
Good sound and picture quality are desirable. Much of Youtube’s content has godawful pixellation and artefacting, which is an experience I find somewhere between staring at the sun and being stuck in a lift with Harriet Harman in terms of discomfort. Newer PCs can cope with 720p and even 1080p, and quite a lot of currently-airing anime is at least 720p, and it looks great.
Broadband speeds vary worldwide. The UK is pretty shabby in that regard but again, not every part of every country has the same speeds as urban areas of Japan and the US. Streaming can be a bit choppy in many places, which is even more infuriating than ropey video or poor resolution; downloading the episode then watching it off your hard drive solves this but (quite rightly really) the Industry types of wary of it. DTO makes it hard to stop piracy since it’s a system open to abuse from unscrupulous viewers who can all too easily ruin the fun for everyone else.
So, what would I do if I were a programming genius with execs from Shaft, KyoAni, Madhouse et al waving contracts at me? The criteria would need to be:
- Decent quality video and audio that can deliver 720p and at least 2.0 stereo, using formats that are compatible with current standards
- The option of live streaming for people with reliable, fast connections and DTO for those who haven’t
- region-locking that *works*…a bit of a bummer, but that’ll have to be thrashed out later
- The option of setting a limit to the timeframe in which the content can be downloaded and viewed
- a system that allows revenue to pay for new licences and site maintenance
The last point is an important one: my personal feeling is that good entertainment is worth paying for. Not necessarily the eye-watering prices those poor Japanese fans pay for their Blu-rays, but a subscription fee is fair enough; CR already uses this, and it’s not a bad idea. The other criteria might sound like a tall order but why do I think it’s possible, at least from a technological/software standpoint? Because the tech already exists, and has been used by millions for some time now.
The answer is obvious for UK residents, but for the rest of you it’s this: BBC iPlayer. To clarify, this is an online service that give access to a lot (not all, due to copyright reasons) of programmes broadcast on BBC TV and radio. After a show is aired it is available on iPlayer streamed, or to download if you prefer.
I personally think iPlayer is one of the best ideas the BBC has ever had. I don’t have a TV so don’t pay a licence fee, but there is some good quality stuff that’s worth watching; if iPlayer required a subscription fee, I’d rather pay it and watch the programmes I like via the internet. It’s a neat way of watching stuff without requiring the infamous TV licence; which is effectively a blanket tax for merely owning a TV set…a stupid idea in this day and age. But I digress.
The clever bit of the iPlayer service is that, if your connection speed can’t reliably support streaming, you can download the programme and watch it later. There’s a timebomb-like feature built in that automatically deletes the file from your machine after a given period, and there’s even a security measure that somehow prevents you taking screencaps (I don’t know how that works, but it does. I tried it). There are even some programmes in high definition, that match the standards of picture of the BBC HD channels.
The iPlayer Desktop application uses on Adobe Air, and can run on Windows or a Mac. Long story short, it works, and fits all the criteria listed above apart from the payment system. So then, the technology exists for viewers to watch their favourite shows but it also has security features built in to allow the site’s webmasters to control who can access the content, and for how long.
I’m suspect there are a lot of other, legal rather than practical, reasons why Crunchyroll’s site and terms of service aren’t ideal and why the fansub/piracy debate rages on. I must confess I’m ignorant to many of them, because right now I’m thinking “what’s stopping it?” If it’s physically getting it to work, there are real-life examples of film and television that is viewable publicly and legally. It works for the viewers AND keeps those corporate folks happy.
The bottom line is that there needs to be freer dialogue between the people who make the shows and the people who watch/buy them. The physical act of getting the content available online however is the easy part…if the rest of the obstacles are insurmountable that’s fair enough, but how cool would it be if the fandom could pull something like this off?
yes, I’m an idiot. I get it
Any minute now, someone’s going to make a point that will make me feel incredibly dumb. I’ve already braced myself for a facepalm that it’ll give my unborn grandkids nosebleeds, so fire away and stop me daydreaming like this. But I at least wanted to try and make a constructive suggestion, because the *real* stupid questions are the ones you don’t ask.
OK! I will give it a shot.
First of all, Crunchyroll actually has a good number of streams for the UK, which I presume is where you care the most. Good meaning better than most, if not all legit streaming sites. I don’t know if you care or you’ve stopped caring because, obviously, you ought to care but can’t bring yourself to do it or something, so I don’t know if you know.
Second, the basic root of your problem is simply that countries and nationalities are where laws end and begin. Copyright is the underpinning concept that gets “sold” via these license agreements which makes CR legit and someone else not legit. Sadly, copyright is a matter of law. So for each English language country CR streams to, they have to “buy” it from the licensee because arguably some other company in that country could be interested in the rights involved that CR wants a piece of. In other words, say Mitsudomoe, it’s not one item that gets bargained for, but many different items that are related. Kind of like buying a car I guess. (And we’re not even going to talk about local markets!)
The UK is pretty much the second-largest English-language anime market outside of Asia, so the price tag for that piece of legal instrument is going to be notable compared to Finland or New Zealand (who gives a damn about them anyways?). Plus this sort of pricing is influenced by potential buyers in the various markets, and CR is really not someone who can just put their foot down and get it done. In fact that is one way outsiders looking in can try to infer what’s going on in the oversea licensing game.
If you recall the problem iTunes had with Europe, let’s just say that we’re seeing different sort of the same core problem playing out in the new media market, thanks to the way we do business internationally. The internet is boundless, the world is not.
A good start there (I’m glad it’s you getting in first, because I know how your more au fait than most about this). What needs to happen, really, before anything else is get the Japanese companies talking I think. I hope I’m right in assuming that red tape at their end is the root cause of distribution problems and associated delays; If the reason why there’s so much red tape is because they’re concerned about losing creative control and losing returns through DTO and streaming sites, there are ways of addressing that.
Is the biggest unknown quantity that of “how much do Japanese companies care about overseas viewers/customers?” In the past, it seems that they only took notice when overseas distributors sepcifically asked, then went back to worrying about the domestic market.
DRM will never solve the “bad apple” problem.. it will, at best, give you a window of opportunity to cash in before someone finally rips the content – and they always will. This means that anime producers would have to rely on a slim window to make all their profits before the existing problem happens again. The whole idea should be to remove the need to distribute the video for “legitimate” fansubbing. You’ll never get rid of the true leeches, and will only harm your paying customers if you are too heavy-handed. It’s lose-lose.
Services like iPlayer and Crunchyroll can win when it’s lower-quality content.. it’s fast, doesn’t kill your bandwidth cap, and still gives you a reason to buy the DVD or BluRay if you’re so inclined to get the best quality product. By going with HD streaming though, you are basically giving away HDTV quality streams to rippers, and things turn out like they are already with HDTV ripping. People will have less reason to buy the BluRay/DVD/etc if they can get a good enough rip, so you’re stuck having to break the quality somehow with overlays and the like.. so at best you’re getting HDTV “online”, with all the problems already there and maybe more.
Worse, this is all assuming that there’s no value to fansubbing and they’re all dirty opportunists making money. They aren’t. Real fansubbers do a real good job even compared to the eventual officially-translated product, and they don’t want a dime.. many of them don’t even care about recognition. Since CR came around there has been a dearth of full rips of CR’s work, so it hasn’t solved anything.. it’s just made it easier for the lazy to gain notoriety instead of doing it “for the love”. This has harmed the real fansubbers AND the efforts of CR, simply because people find it more convenient than using CR’s service, or can’t GET the service in the first place.
Moreover, fansubs aren’t inherently evil. If an iPlayer-like system COULD work, and permitted people to soft-sub their own way, then fansubbers would be HAPPY. It would mean they wouldn’t have to distribute video, just subs. They would not have to worry about so much about providing their own rip due to there being 50 rips and having to choose or encode their own. They may still eventually provide BluRay/DVD rips, though, because those mediums make it impossible to fansub to begin with, and even making a legitimate backup-copy that is fansubbed is tougher than it ought to be.
So if you can tackle that, then you’re only left with the lazy subbers (the ones who just capture CR streams, subs and all). Getting rid of the them, well that’s “easier”.. just remove the need for them by offering CR in other regions, and a version that lets people use their own fansubs, including perhaps donating them. Assuming people have enough bandwidth to stream, and enough CPU power to softsub, you’re set.
The rest of the problem won’t be solved by any means. You’re basically going to be pissing in the wind trying to stamp out the leeches who will never pay. You want to convert them into payers, not harm your existing payers by focusing on people who will never pay anyway. This is a concept modern distributors and publishers just don’t seem to grasp.
I have little to add to the discussion (which never stopped me before). I’ll just point out the obvious, that we’re still trying to figure out a system that works in the context of technology the copyright authors never dreamed would exist. The solutions everyone puts out might put out a little fire but start others.
An absurd example from when I worked in a library and we were trying to offer e-books to patrons through an outside vendor. The patron would check out the e-book online using their library card number, and they’d have two weeks to read it before the file died on them. Fine and dandy. However, since the company had a “library” mindset about it, only one copy of the file could be checked out at one time; no other patron was allowed to check it out if someone had it. Even back then it just seemed terribly wrongheaded. We were allowing old concepts to dictate how we made information available to the public. … But I had no clue how to fix it. I still don’t.
The problem is about red tape, and it has nothing to do with DRM or any technical limitation with streaming.
If you follow US licensing trends, you might know that Funimation has a particular stance that for everything they license for home video sale (which nets Japan’s licensor (I made a typo earlier) much more money than streaming does), they want the streaming rights too. So how the hell can CR compete with that when Funi says “hey we might be interested in this title, let’s talk”? CR would probably get cockblocked.
The same scenario can play out in any other country where you have a local publisher (and UK has actually somewhat of a licensing scene) who might want the same sort of thing? Or worse, there are a non-trivial number of licensees on the market who see online streaming as a way that cannibalizes home video sales. In other words, they think when shows get streamed for free (which everyone basically does this sans a handful), fewer people will end up buying their DVDs, and so they don’t want it to happen for the region/country they are interested in licensing in.
So it’s not just a “blame Japan” problem. Stress on “just.” It’s complicated, to say the least.
It’s the quality of translation, that influences many of us to prefer fansubs. We want the cultural references and allusions left in; not the dumbed-down version, produced for a generic mainstream audience.
Have you seen Funimation’s Hetalia? The Pain! There’s no way I’d suffer through that. Without [gg], we wouldn’t have Hetalia.
Now, if Crunchyroll/etc could provide an alternative-subtitle-track loading mechanism, and the fansubbers all consistently made their scripts available, everyone would win. Let us pick and choose. Could easily have tracks with and without footnotes. It should be like changing audio/subtitle track on a dvd. See also the ever-perfect http://www.ji-hi.net for how to envision such a thing.
Don’t make us watch dubs, and don’t make us read the butchered writing!
pass it on.