Archive for the 'Anime' Category

There has been a few local news regarding illegal downloading of anime, particularly regarding ODEX’s endeavor to fine bittorrent users. I believe this form of suppression is not limited to Singapore but to the world at large. Even at ISP level, traffic shaping has been the ultimate form of suppression, here’s a recent article of a new tool; Sandvine.

Honestly speaking, from a business view point, I think ODEX and some of these ISPs don’t make sense in long term. Put it this way, if a smart ISP or anime provider would want to compete in this ecosystem, a killer move would be to provide a network that accommodate to customers’ trend which is distribution of digital content via Bittorrent, and profit from it.

All great businesses focus on “How to provide customer satisfaction?” Generally, self-centeredness of humans and organizations will prevail as clearly seen in the statement made by an ISP participating in the torrentfreak discussion.

If most end-users are into Bittorrent, then who are the other customers they were referring to??? Are you saying that you mixed the business and home-consumer users networks together such that former users are affected??? If you are refering to home users who are casually surfing or emailing, I seriously doubt they would ever be affected due to infrequent usage.

As for the case of ODEX, I gathered that their product quality is sub-standard. Some of the local blogs that discuss this issue in greater depth can be found here, here and here. My impression so far of ODEX is that of a monopolistic sub-standard organization that refuses to improve and has taken the route to become public enemy of anime lovers locally.

The “milking” tactic Odex has employed reminds me of Streetdirectory.com’s saga that didn’t ended too well for the aggressor (ie. streetdirectory). It is likely that history will repeat itself.

Let’s look at things rationally, who on earth would pay for sub-standard content that is low in resolution and badly sub’ed (ie. sub-titled) when there is a convenient way to obtain higher quality content for free? Even an idiot can give you the right answer.

It may seemed that I am advocating piracy but the fact is, humans like freebies and this is a fact. If I am wrong, please explain why are there so many trial-ware, free-ware, shareware, free emails, free trailers etc etc. So let he who is without, sin cast the first stone…

And the irony here is that some of these anime series are popularized by fan-subs. The “piracy” in anime differs slightly from the classic digital content piracy since end-users do put in effort to add-value by providing fan-sub and re-distributing without monetizing from the effort. Yes, it is illegal to re-distribute whether or not one is making money from it but the fact here is, these fansubs (usually) are better and faster (in terms of releases under different languages).

So in the case of ODEX vs the fans: it looks like ODEX is forcing people to pay for not buying inferior anime from them. I think that stinks! If the story were something like “ODEX had high quality animes on sale at reasonable price and yet people are still downloading…”, then it would still make sense that ODEX took legal actions.

For the content owners, I believe it make sense to look at the quality of the distributorship and focus on the people who are viewers (and potential buyers). The global trends are obvious:

- The world is getting more connected with faster Internet
- Users want convenient content distribution channel, be it Bittorrent or any other medium
- Users want timely quality content
- Users are willing to pay for quality and speed

I know readers will argue the last point. If there is free stuff why would users pay? From marketing view point, reaching a huge pool of audience quickly and regularly by leveraging technology is good and important for business. Compare p2p distribution with the traditional server-client download approach, using the latter, there is NO way to reach so many users without forking an arm or leg for bandwidth and hardware. By tapping into p2p networks, you are killing two birds (bandwidth and marketing reach) with one stone!

A viable business model; the Freemium business model focuses on converting free-using users to be paid user by offering them with premium features to users are willing to pay for. In the context anime, there are several ways (even with my limited exposure and knowledge that I could come up with) to monetize through advertising, merchandising physical products and other value-added features.

For content creators, I believe in the current digital age, there is almost little value that some of these distributors are adding into the chain. Apart for the need to license and sell physical products such as collectibles, figurines and posters, I seriously don’t think there is any need to sell digital works through middle-men who in some cases like ODEX, may hurt the popularity of your works.

So instead of threatening and controlling users, why not spend some energy exploring how to deliver quality contents to local or even overseas customers such that they are willing to pay?

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