May 31, 2007
Late Night Networks Scramble as Anime Captures Younger Watchers
Posted by Devin
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The major late night shows, once a sure bet for capturing younger demographics (those 18-24 yr olds), are now growing audiences long in the tooth. According to this week’s issue of Brandweek, The Tonight Show continues to skew with a 51.9 median age, while Conan draw the youngest viewership out of all major network shows with the ripe age of 44.2!
Among the sea of cable channels…none has made a bigger splash than targeted animated and comedy far like Cowboy Bebop, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Robot Chicken.“Adult Swim has really struck a cord, especially with young men who don’t want a lot of television,” says Brad Adgate, senior vp, director of research at Horizon Media. “If you have a show that brings up a large concentration of viewing males, marketers will be more than happy to participate.”
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While Adult Swim has been building their audience the last few years with now six days a week with their own shows and related anime properties, other networks have taken notice. The Scifi Channel announced earlier this month they are testing the waters with an anime block on Mondays. Per an earlier post, IFC has heavily promoted their late-night anime block while IATV has rolled out several evenings of late night anime. As more and more anime ends up on late night television, its being driven by the mobs of 18-24 males not watching Leno.
Filed To: Distribution / Adv/Marketing
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May 21, 2007
Hollywood Invests in Ideas; Finance Invests in Dollars into Asian Media
Posted by Devin
The influences on Hollywood and the Asian film & movie industry have been trading everything from plot development nuances to outright redo’s of major movies the last number of years. The number of examples of each market’s influence on each other are too numerous to count, even if they’ve been labeled as particularly risky ventures.
But it seems that adapting to a far-east movie philosophy is starting to become commonplace in Hollywood’s screenwriting community. Today’s case in point is the upcoming “Pirates” trilogy, At World’s End.
We essentially abandoned the typical three-act structure for the motion picture,” [Ted Elliott] continues. “And we were influenced by foreign movies that came out of cultures that are markedly different from Western culture, particularly Hong Kong movies and Japanese anime. What they create is this kind of dream logic, and we were trying to imitate that in ‘Dead Man’s Chest,’ which is not common to Hollywood films. … We did this in the first movie and we did it really well, and we pushed it even further in the second.”Given the value of the “Pirates” property, and Disney’s sizable investment in it, one might expect the studio to have had a hand in shaping every part of the material.
“Creatively, I haven’t heard a word from the studio as to what they think it should be, beyond good,” says Rossio.
Despite the artsy dollops of Brecht, the writers maintain an awareness of who they work for, and just how far out of the Mouse cage they can go.
But the newest trend watch is not ideas, but US dollars investing directly or indirectly into Asian media companies. General Electric is mulling over a possible investment into the
Korean cable TV sector if a recently concluded free trade agreement between the U.S. and South Korea is ratified. And today, Fuji TV and TV Asahi bought more shares of Toei Animation, all because of certain cross-border party:
The buy was apparently in reaction to the recent purchase of 5.1 percent of Toei Animation shares by US hedge fund Steel Partners. Both TV Asahi and Fuji TV are, not simply shareholders, but long-term partners with Toei Animation in the production and broadcasting of the toon house’s shows. By boosting the stakes owned by its corporate allies, Toei Animation hopes to stave off a bid by an outsider like Steel Partners to influence its corporate governance.
Clearly the trend is for a more careful look into Asian media: not only because of its influence in the US pop-culture market, but because its become a profit center derived from its increasing success. Even with some international regulations falling by the wayside, Asian media prefers to be owned if only for keeping content creation under its own control. Yes, even if there’s love in the air as this year’s Cannes, an outright buy of an Asian media company is still a bit far away.
Filed To: Distribution / Over in Asia / Retail
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May 18, 2007
Anime BitTorrent Focus: Love the Sharing
Posted by Devin
Downloading unlicensed anime has never been easier. IRC used to be the place where fansubbers distributed their new releases, but five or six years ago BitTorrent and other p2p trackers sites like AnimeSuki took over. Now thousands of unlicensed anime (Unlicensed here, btw) can be downloaded and distributed.
A new study published today says that BitTorrent’s are hot…but for TV:
TV-series are by far the most shared files on BitTorrent. Nearly 50% of all the people who use BitTorrent at any given point in time do this to download a TV-show, even though the number of available torrents are much lower than for Music or Video. The second most popular torrent category based on the number of downloaders and uploaders is Video (15.7%), followed by Games (8.6%), Music (7.8%) and of course XXX (6.0%).
Next on the list is Anime (5.4%). When it come to shear number type of torrents are offered, Anime (4.3%) lacks again behind Music (25.9%), Video (24.2%), Applications (13.3%), and Games (7.8%).
However, not all is lost. It seems anime fans do have a spine:
Sharing is one of key features of BitTorrent etiquette. The more people that are sharing a file, the faster other people are able to download it. If we take a look at the sharing ratios of the categories we see that Anime fans have an impressive share ratio of 2.5, and are sharing the most. Anime fans are followed by people who download Music (ratio 1.9) and Applications (ratio 1.5) respectively.
Its not suprising that licensing companes are starting to distribute their warez via BitTorrent: Kadokawa and ADV has been leveraging it for promotion reasons for the last couple of years.
Does that mean that people who share anime are more honest because they share so much? I wonder how that breaks down between anime that is licensed and unlicensed?
Filed To: Distribution / Digital / Licensing
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May 9, 2007
Add Anime & Manga Characters to your Blog in Japan — Legally
Posted by Devin
For the thousands of people who have blogs and images with plenty of scans from Japan, now there’s a way to legally use characters for your own blog. Its a great way for companies to engage with their customers by giving them access to exclusive content and news.
Production I.G., Trans Cosmos and Animo have joined together to create a new blog service “Decoblog”. The beta version launched on March 22nd of this year. They aim to attract 500,000 users within just three years. Production I.G. will allow several of its character properties to be used in the venture. Users can choose over 500 styles of these characters for their blogs. They exhibited their new service at the Tokyo Anime Festival, where they presented the Decoblog service with a promotional video and some trials for attendees.
With so many pop-culture social networks popping up in the last six months from FUNimation and Tokyopop, there’s still a question of legally with their use of content from Japan. Despite numerous legal claims filed against operators of similar web sites YouTube and MySpace, it has not been untested whether or not such website operators are liable for copyright infringement from their users uploading and sharing protected content.
An acceptable solution might be blanket licensing, used right now in the music industry. ASCAP, BMI, and the Harry Fox Agnecy are all organizations that copyright owners can join to give it a mandate to license its content. Unfortunately, Japanese content organizations such as JASRAC have taken mostly confrontational situation against infringers like YouTube.
As a counterpoint, some Japanese firms have started to setup licensing arms: Kadokawa Group Holdings established a new company, Kadokawa Production, to manage the copyright of their contents. Kadokawa’s works will be intensively managed, with the eventual goal of licensing out of merchandising and screen rights.
So right now, there really isn’t a sure way to license those characters. Maybe what’s needed in the future is an international anime & manga rights organization, especially for licensing rights outside in Japan. Maybe we’ll be seeing it soon–
Source: 3/9/2007 Nikkei Sangyou Shimbun, 3/9/2007 RBB Today
Filed To: Over in Asia / Digital / Licensing
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