Who are you and what have you done with Gregory!?

(your e-mail doesn't have any of the usual issues that have turned up latel
y)

On a more serious note...

--- On Fri, 7/10/09, Gregory Himes <gdhimes@yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Gregory Himes <gdhimes@yahoo.com>
> Subject: [tenchi:106436] Seikishi Monogatari and Anime Expo
> To: tenchi@usagi.org
> Date: Friday, July 10, 2009, 12:35 PM
>
>
> Nobody ever listends to me...=A0 CPM was dead (DVD wise)
> more than 2 years ago, as evidenced by locked and abandone
> offices, a degenerating web-site and servers, lack of
> licensing... distribution, and sales.=A0 I think the only
> reason it took so long was
> that the bankruptcy papers, stock consolidation/burn-off,
> and bookkeeping took nearly that long to accomplish.=A0
> i.e., GET YOUR AFFAIRS IN ORDER!

I hope none of their licenses ended up in ownership limbo as a result.  To 
this day no one knows exactly who has the US rights to Macross: DYRL due to
 the fact that both of the companies that licensed it for US release went u
nder and bits of the companies went in different directions.  I'd hate to s
ee something similar with an older CPM title.

> I still think the Japanese distibutors would do well to
> consider Dual-Market strategy from the start, and then for
> the more popular projects, PRESS the discs here where the
> quantity factor will also bring the Japanese retail prices
> down, even when
> shipping back to Japan is considered.=A0 It costs almost
> nothing (a little over a dime) to press DVDs for most medium
> market quantities, and that will (at the current rate of HD
> mania) soon be true of BD, which I'm guessing will come down
> to about 30
> cents or so.

Fully agreed.  I first really became aware of this possibility when people 
were speculating whether or not Big West would use it as a way to bypass Ha
rmony Gold's Macross license in a Macross Frontier release.  A Blu-Ray disc
 with English subs that was "only" sold in Japan could probably sidestep th
e dispute over the Macross name and might get a large volume of sales that 
mysteriously made their way overseas after leaving the retailer.

Didn't happen, though.

There is one potential issue with this hypothetical industry model, and tha
t would be the discrepency in pricing between videos in the US and Japan.  
Animeigo originally went with the Japanese model back when no one knew how 
the US model would work out, but practices have changed.  Pricing videos as
 is done in Japan would hurt US sales, while pricing them here as is the ty
pical US custom could inadvertantly cause competition with the sales back h
ome.

> Lets just hope that the current "crisis" will give a swift
> boot to the head ^_^ to the industry and get them started on
> a new and more appropriate strategy for these times (before
> things change enough that another reorganization will be in
> order...
> about 5 years? from now).

While reading Alan's e-mail, I was reminded that ADV originally started out
 as the "we hate them" company.  Then they (mostly) got better and ended up
 becoming the industry giant.  It wasn't all that long ago that Funimation 
was the "we hate them" company...


I dropped by Animeigo's website a few months ago, and as far as I can tell 
they're focusing pretty much exclusively on live-action (mostly Samurai) fi
lms these days.  They lost the license for Kimagure Orange Road a couple of
 years back (random comment related to Animeigo licenses - a few months bac
k I went hunting on the internet for a specific type of UY image showing Lu
m in her school uniform floating alongside Ataru, and an awful lot of the "
Lum" images that I found were actually of Ayukawa Madoka drawn up as Lum o.
O) , and as far as I can tell their last anime related projects were the Ma
cross release a few years ago and converting all of Urusei Yatsura to DVD. 
 ADV now has Macross and the UY conversion is finished.  So far as I could 
tell through my visit to the website, Animeigo seems to be limiting its ani
me product to just the series that it already has the licenses for (and pro
bably isn't going to lose anytime soon - I would assume that since
 these are all very old licenses none of them have reversion clauses).



junior
=0A=0A=0A