Three announcements in quick succession:<\/p>\n
1) ADV Films is in deep financial trouble<\/a> and has once again lost the rights<\/a> to several of their current anime<\/a> series (including, frustratingly, Kanon<\/em><\/a> just days before they were scheduled to release the final DVD.)<\/p>\n 2) FUNimation Entertainment has acquired the rights<\/a> to all the series orphaned by Geneon when it abandoned the North American market last fall. I predicted<\/a> something like this, but this seems to have worked out even better than I expected. They plan to finish the incomplete series like When They Cry<\/em><\/a>, the second season of Rozen Maiden<\/em><\/a>, and The Story of Saiunkoku<\/em>.<\/p>\n 3) FUNimation Entertainment has acquired the rights<\/a> to the series lost by ADV. So I offer my congratulations to FUNimation, and also my heartfelt thanks. A year ago FUNimation and ADV seemed roughly equal; now ADV looks doomed and FUNimation is the clearly the leading publisher of anime for the North American market.<\/p>\n Furthermore, by promising to finish the incomplete series they may have saved the market. It was starting to look very unwise to buy a DVD series before it was complete, yet publishers depend on these early sales to cover most of their costs. The whole industry had seemed poised to go into a death spiral.<\/p>\n Yet I still have a nagging worry: is FUNimation overextended? It seems to me that the only anime publishers who are likely to prosper are those who realize that the North American market is a small niche market, and will never be a mass market like Japan, and who control their costs accordingly.<\/p>\n Geneon and ADV got into trouble (I think) because they read too much into the rapid growth of the market (from a near-zero base) at the beginning of the 21st century, and assumed that it would continue to grow until it became a true mass market. They overextended themselves, building up a cost structure that could not be maintained.<\/p>\n Could FUNimation go the same way? FUNimation claims to be profitable, but I see possible danger signs. They now have licensed an incredible number of series (though I trust they got the latest ones at bargain-basement prices.) Like ADV, they continue to operate an anime cable-TV channel, a venture that probably loses vast amounts of money.<\/p>\n The danger, of course, is that if FUNimation goes down the North American anime market may never recover. All I can do is wish them the best and hope that they know what they are doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three announcements in quick succession: 1) ADV Films is in deep financial trouble and has once again lost the rights to several of their current anime<\/a> series (including, frustratingly, Kanon… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[93,165,120],"class_list":["post-1465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime","tag-adv-films","tag-funimation","tag-geneon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/p>\n