For a company who has been repackaging a lot of titles lately, I wonder how much that's true? On the one hand, no, probably no one would be shelling out big bucks to get Indian Summer on Blu-Ray. But what about, say, Evangelion? Would you consider buying a remastered Blu-Ray edition of Evangelion?
Granted, ADV can't just jump straight into such a release, since the original Evangelion TV series and End of Evangelion films haven't been released on Blu-Ray-- only Evangelion 1.0 has, and FUNi has the movie's license. Coincidentally, that Japanese BD release of 1.0 just hit stores today.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, I could imagine a couple of series tentatively doing okay on BD-- properly remastered, Excel Saga might, and possibly Full Metal Panic!. What do you think?
Although we will never get proper Blu-ray's of Excel or FMP though unfortunately.
The statement is especially ridiculous considering that ADV has been quick to play the "hey, we're doing Blu-ray!" card whenever they need a piece of promising news to string fans along with. They did it in February 2008 after many of their DVDs started suffering delays and Newtype USA went away, again at Anime Expo 2008 after FUNimation had taken many of their licenses, and again in January 2009 right around the time that it became public that Best Buy was going to be discontinuing (if not at least shrinking) anime's presence in their stores. Just as they used to say "yeah we're still doing manga" and still say "yeah there is significant movement on the Eva live-action movie." As long as you think they're alive enough to buy another ADV title that's on the shelf, it’s apparently worth it.
AFAIK, in order for a studio like ADV Films to distribute Blu-rays and use the Blu-ray logo, they'd have to pay a licensing fee and sign a Content Provider Agreement (CPA) with the Blu-Ray Disc Association. The annual fee for a CPA is $3,000. The catch, however, is that the agreement term lasts for FIVE YEARS. While ADV only has to pay $3,000 each year, it still adds up to $15,000 for the right to make and sell Blu-ray discs. Ouch.
Hold on. It gets even better.
Once ADV Films signs up for their CPA with the Blu-ray Boys™, they are REQUIRED to pay a one-time licensing fee to AACS (Advanced Access Content System) in the amount of $3,000, a per-title fee of $1,300-1,600 and a "royalty fee" of some kind for each disc that's made.
So, once you do the math, an indy/boutique publisher like ADV could be looking at a $7,300 "buy-in" before their first Blu-ray disc is even produced or sold. That's not even counting the additional $12,000 they'll have to pony up for the rest of their BD licensing agreement or whatever costs there would be for each disc they replicate.
By the way, I'm also not even factoring what costs there would be for ADV to license the high-definition materials from the Japanese parent companies. Who knows how many more zeros would be added to that total? For something like Evangelion? Quite a lot, I would believe, like newtypecj mentions upthread.
While the Blu-ray and AACS fees are peanuts to the big Hollywood studios, for the smaller distributors like ADV, Media Blasters and Bandai it can kill any chance of making a decent return profit on a Blu-Ray anime title.
Anyone else remember the claim of Full Metal Panic and Rahxephon on WMV-HD as a way to claim being ready for HD releases in 2004?
As for HS no wonder Zac shooed you off from Anime News Network and your former partner Quarkboy at mania publicaly said you have no journalist ethics and why he doesn't want to have anything to do with your site. LULZ