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May 17, 2024 16:50
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- BULBASAUR
- Apr 6, 2009
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Soiled Meat
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Honestly, as someone who played both sides of the table back then, I think it was almost purely a commercial correction. You're right that interest was in the process of popping, but interest popping has a long lead time in an industry that works, empirically, around both a consumer's 15-year cycle from 1st grade to college graduation and a producer's 15-year cycle from college graduation to senior creative.
First, interest. Interest is a loving miserable thing to track because you have hard "can't apples:apples this" lines around at a minimum:
* ~1998 broadcast change to cable
* 1999 package soft change from $40/50m tapes to $25/75m DVDs
* 2001 enthusiast-but-cheap change from $8 pirate tapes to free pirate torrents
* ~2005 beginning of the package soft overproduction meta, due to the declining rate of profit setting off a hunt for any possible hit through $5/75m or $25/550m DVDs
* ~2008 beginning of the enthusiast-but-cheap change from free pirate torrents to free pirate streaming
* 2008 dropping from cable for rising-costs rather than dropping-sales reasons
* 2012 beginning of package soft settling in at a middle ground of $75/550m DVDs
* 2013-2014 shift of enthusiast-but-cheap from free pirate streaming to pennies-a-day legit streaming
Within all of these the old category was on an upswing until it evaporated; I'm most familiar with the torrent part and it was not at all unusual in 2009-2010 to see 100k-150k dls of moderate hits at a scale that produced 15-20k in 2006 or 2007, for example.
The commercial process, though. The core problem of the industry is that there are two key contradictions that it's in no one's interest to fully recognize in the US market: there is a low-margin high-volume feeder market vs. a high-margin low-volume core market, and the status of a title on one side of the Pacific says nothing about its status on the other. From this angle:
* Feeder broadcast market petered out in the early 00s, with the shift to cable solidifying both the US market's increased capital-intensiveness and ability to target specific content rather than essentially buying up found footage, and Japan's ability to negotiate prices up.
* Most American-owned side core market companies were overleveraged to begin with--remember, companies like ADV grew out of video rental shops with an Amiga kicking around the back room--and had to leverage themselves even more due to increasing volumes and increasing competition. This led to a death spiral of printing thousands of copies of anything, achieving minimal sellthrough until the discount to $5, and then printing thousands of copies of the next garbage show because the last one eventually sold through.
* Japanese-owned side core market companies could not compete with selling anime as a generic product in this context; Pioneer calls it quits while Bandai attempts to power through until their competition goes bankrupt and prices rebound.
* American-owned side does indeed go bankrupt, but parachutes straight over from "flood with anything" to "flood with low-bid core products as the junior portion of a JV". It stabilizes them, but Funimation (which does eventually JV) can afford to keep prices at a low-margin midpoint through DBZ and its Christian media sideline, TRSI (which does eventually JV) can afford to keep prices at a low-margin midpoint through its distribution arm, and while those two big fish can hold pricing a bit higher and ride the long tail a bit longer...
* It does blow out the "core market equilibrium is $200 a season with lots of tchotchkes" assumption that kept Bandai in. They fold even while growing profitably (somehow, ask me about entire salvage retailer warehouse lanes full of Cutey Honey live-action lunchboxes) because the expectation is growth back to that point and whoops.
* With no one left around fire-saling in hopes of future growth, cable can no longer take its pick of cheap filler and hits the point where it's cheaper to just make ATHF themselves or whatever. "Legit", "discoverable" feeder market disappears completely for a while, and doesn't really come back because cable never had the viewership of broadcast and streaming doesn't have the linear showcaseness of cable.
* Finally, Funi and Crunchy, both JVs at this point (TV Tokyo was in Crunchy heavy before it went to AT&T, and Funi has been gradually eaten by Sony), synthesize "there's no competition in the feeder market" and economies of scale to come up with anime flavors of the modern streaming experience. Which, since it's AYCE, drags core right back down.
* We are here, in the gap which would have been the peak enthusiasm years for people who got pulled in through cable; instead there's just the limited set of ducklings who didn't get in until streaming and the greybeards who've been in since Pokemon was on Fox at 4pm. And of course KLK was an early streaming star for those ducklings; it's visually flashy, made by people with a lot of core market cred, and a straight-up action show in an era where the Japanese core market direction was split between talky esoterica and pop music vehicles.
tl;dr we're probably on a limited upswing of core through 2025-2030 when aging out once again matches aging in, but longterm never going to hit 2000s again because there's never again going to be dull childhood afternoons where your only kid-to-teen choices for the TV are a Japanese video game or broadcast anime to get people in, and prestige poo poo will never again be a product in itself rather than bonus value to a streaming sub.
lol nerd
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Jan 12, 2021 04:44
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May 17, 2024 16:50
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Jan 10, 2021 05:06
