The Anime Infomercial
This post is about me talking about things I don’t really know, but it all came together and made sense anyways. It’s the kind of information that some industry insiders take for granted and don’t explain anywhere, but obviously I am not one so I can only say so much, with probably a low level of confidence. But at any rate, I hope the conclusions draw themselves so I don’t have to pop some rhetorical questions. Wait, who am I kidding–
The discussion originated from digitalboy’s post about context and late-night anime consumptive mode(s). There are a variety of issues that the post covered, but during the subsequent comments and meta-comments, JP (who works for some television media conglomerate) outlined the following. See below, repeated, with some added notes. Also please note that this post diverges from the main points made in digitalboy’s posts so you can probably ignore that.
[A]merican tv setup: cartoon network pays twentieth television/fuzzy door productions X dollars for the syndication rights to air each episode of family guy Y times over Z years. They pay for this because those 11pm airings get good viewership. Tv licensing contracts almost always define an exhibition as airing a title/episode a certain number of times in a day. so if the deal says cartoon network can air each episode of family guy say, 36 times over 3 years, it really means they can air each episode more like 108 times over 3 years. by running that 3am slot, it costs them nothing and hell, based on the audience maybe the ad rates are better than if they were just running BILLY MAYS HERE FOR OXYCLEAN
[J]apanese tv setup: schoolgirl milky crisis production company pays specific UHF stations X dollars to buy Y weeks of airtime at 3am. Unlike cartoon network, these are local stations. If you don’t live in an ever-dwindling area of japan, these will not air on your tv, period. [Less so the case nowadays.] so you can’t even “be up randomly at 2am and turn on the tv and see it”. some shows buy ad time on cable/satellite stations, rather than UHF stations, but the MSO [short for cable companies] penetration in japan is MUCH lower than in america (less than 20% in japan!) so that is not an equal comparison. [Not that it matters, but the factoid is.]
[I]n the cartoon network scenario, fox has made their money, and cartoon network really only has the opportunity costs of airing something else in that slot to lose. In the schoolgirl milky crisis scenario, terebi kanagawa got their money, but schoolgirl milky crisis production company has everything to lose because they still need to make money on this somehow!
First I apologize for framing a fairly casual illustration in a serious manner (wait, this blog is not SRSBZNS, but w/e). It is definitely out of context (some). So let’s just focus the meat of it–the nature of television station running programs that it finds profitable.
BILLY MAYS HERE FOR OXYCLEAN is coincidentally capitalized, and for good reason–it is key to understanding. The reference points to infomercials, which stands in for paid programming in the general sense of the term, not just for straight advertisement. The point is, really, late night anime in Japan is generally paid programming. Speaking personally I don’t quite know the totality and full implication of what a committee-owned-and-produced anime production means until I had the time to piece all of it together the past couple years. Generally a production group is made up of a handful of companies–holding companies investing in the show, merchandising companies, publishers and record labels and media companies, and TV companies. That’s not really unusual. But the purpose of this conglomerate is to produce an advertisement. This is why they would pay TV companies to air the stuff–so people would watch it, and buy the stuff related to the thing they saw. This is contrary to the other types of shows (that we’re more familiar with) in which a (usually smaller) group produces content, and then sells TV syndication rights to broadcast companies, and these TV stations make their money back from the ad revenue.
Basically, when your favorite anime studio gets hired to put out something, they’re guns for hire. It’s a bit like when EA pumps out some shovel-ware game based on a movie, except it’s a tad backwards chronologically. The realization singlehandedly answers questions like “why manga is usuallyalways better?” and “why are there so relatively few original anime?” It also answers why anime caters to niches of niches, like moe. And why non-pornographic eroge adaptations exists.
The corollaries come thus (and some links that are good reads):
If paid programming in the form of anime is where it’s at then what are the alternatives? Do nobody in Japan watch late-night TV? (That is not porn?) I mean, I sort of wish there’s some write-up on the business end of channels like Animax or AT-X, which are the two premium cable/satellite TV channel that have a ton of the “late night” anime content.
Reading about late night anime on Wikipedia, the second question is also natural: If paid programming fill gaps where viewership numbers are too low to support purely ad-based programming for TV stations, why are these viewership numbers high enough to support this kind of brokered programming? I mean how much money can UHF anime bring in? So why do they produce it? I guess between AT-X and Animax there are a lot of late night TV anime that people enjoy, so one reason is simply that TV companies are serious investors of this stuff, for some kind of added value beyond the business mechanism that was described above. Also, that Square-Enix manga thing that was posted recently explains a lot as well, in that anime works quite well as ads for manga. I’m not sure if any particular Square-Enix title typifies the late night anime profile (Kuroshitsuji?) but the points on Saki and comedies are well taken.
This is a problem with “mainstream” complaints about content, for obvious reasons I guess. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, maybe that’s for the best.
The late night anime article goes as far as to say that this method of anime broadcasting is partly why direct-to-video anime is on the down low, because the effect of distributing anime via paid programming is similar in terms of overall risk. Risk in a simple sense is determined as function of a cost in production or in losses and a probability of realizing that loss. While how profitable an anime is doesn’t drastically increase no matter what time slot you air it in (but it could decrease) as that’s a qualitative measure (crap anime is crap amirite), the risk decreases if:
- you split the cost between different people, so hopefully nobody is left holding the bag and gets knocked out.
- you lower the cost by limiting exposure–late night paid-for slots, etc. And as implied by the wiki article, it also lowers the number of sponsors you need to split the cost effectively.
- you target a niche to produce for, and reduce the need for $$$ super fancy visuals and long development cycles, etc.
- …and there are other stuff you could do.
But of course, in the end people still have to buy their Strike Witches or Bakemonogatari DVD/BD to make the paid programming analog to direct-to-video work, at least for publishers of anime. (Also that doesn’t mean anything to adult anime since you can’t really broadcast that.) It’s just that invariably people will also buy the other merchandise, too.
On the flip side, because financial risk is low, the financial burden from creative risk taking is also low logically. By the same token, that would foster more creative diversity in late night anime. That also allows some bad shows to achieve some economic feasibility. But to me, failure is mother to success, right? I think we can’t have great anime without crap at the same time.
There is probably going to be a follow up to this post, so I guess stay tuned.
This specific business model also explains why when a few sites/studios showed that it was possible, a whole bunch of the bigger Japanese production companies ended up jumping on the whole quick-translation-and-shove-a-stream-up-online deal. It’s essentially extra revenue for them for very little additional cost since they’re already planning to recoup their investements in other ways. Chocolate coating on the gooey centre.
I don’t know if the revenue is so obvious. There are still costs associated with streaming distribution and the margin is very low. As such, it makes less sense to “sell” video content online–after all that stuff is all not meant to make money entirely on its own in the first place.
It may explain Kadokawa’s youtube-channel. Presumably little cost for them, they get some ad revenue from Youtube, and it’s advertising for their real business: manga publishing.
I think once the top management realizes the valuation of online streaming in a more realistic sense (eg., to properly gauge the influence of illegal distribution via p2p type sharing) they will make moves accordingly. There’s also a matter of choice if you want to adapt a business model that is more tolerant of people watching your paid programming for free, and capitalizes it that way. But they certainly do not have to.
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