Essay: The Anime Industry of the Future?

There's a lot of interesting things to say about Crunchyroll and FUNimation's streaming licenses of currently-running shows in Japan, allowing for international simul- and near-simul-broadcasting of the shows.

One of the things that struck me the most: when FUNimation announced that they'd be streaming Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~, I followed up and learned that they did NOT have the license to release DVDs or anything else. At first it seemed odd and I thought it was probably that the Japanese company wasn't ready to sell the license because they wanted to see how the show did.

But the more I thought about it the more I realized how clever it is-- FUNimation basically gets a test run to see how well the show does, what people like about it, and how to market it, all for considerably less overhead cost than a full release was. They can decide whether it would sell on DVD at all, whether it's a show that would be best served by a dub, whether it might be a candidate for TV broadcast, and all that other good stuff.

I eventually started painting myself a picture of what the future of the North American anime industry might entail. First off, I expect to see a lot less anime available on DVD-- the market has been shrinking, and while I don't think it's dying, and while it may even expand again in the future, I think the time of the anime DVD may be over.

That doesn't mean we won't have legitimate access to it, though. I pictured most anime getting licensed for streaming-only releases, simultaneously for bigger series, near-simultaneously or perhaps delayed slightly for lesser-known. The anime companies who acquire these licenses get all the aforementioned benefits and acquire DVD and other rights as they calculate profitability.

Companies that might not have the resources for the swift subbing and streaming required from this can benefit from Crunchyroll's doing so, since CR has yet to acquire DVD rights to any of their titles. I'm not at all sure what Crunchyroll does with the information it gleans from its streaming-- it might be given to the Japanese owners as part of their contract, and maybe those owners then pass the information on to possible licensors. On the other hand, if Crunchyroll keeps that information close to the chest, they might be able to turn a bit of bonus profit selling it to North American anime companies so that they know what to license.

The manga world is a bit murkier to me in this case because we have relatively few examples of manga on the Internet, much less simultaneously-released on the 'net-- it's not hard to imagine a similar structure for manga being in place, and plenty of people read their manga online illegally...but it doesn't seem to have been quite as big a problem for manga companies as anime, perhaps because their product is cheaper. I think we'll see more online manga, possibly more simultaneous releases like Rinne, but probably only for those big names.

All speculation on my part, of course, but to riff off McDonald's...hey, it could happen. Where do YOU see the anime industry in he next five or so years?