A little over a year ago, Sony acquired Crunchyroll from WarnerMedia (a division of AT&T) for $1.175 billion. Sony already owned Funimation, so it was only a matter of time before they merged the two streaming services together.

That time has come, and Funimation content is moving to Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll has the most subscribers in the most markets and the largest catalog in the business, so it made sense to go forward under the Crunchyroll brand.

As of March 1, 2022, existing and new Crunchyroll subscribers will have access to library and simulcast content previously exclusive to Funimation. All new series from the upcoming Spring 2022 season will stream exclusively on Crunchyroll; Funimation will only continue to add new episodes of current series.

So Funimation is grandfathering existing series that are still adding episodes. Once they are finished, Funimation will be too, with its home video operations "eventually moving to the Crunchyroll brand internationally."

This is a welcome development. Having dropped Netflix (temporarily), I was thinking of subscribing to Funimation for a month or two to pick up a few exclusives. A quick check shows about half of them have already moved over.

Though given the size of the Funimation catalog, and that many titles will have to be re-encoded to convert the subtitles, the move may take several months. Plus Funimation is still adding contractual content through the rest of March.

Like Netflix, Crunchyroll uses embedded subtitles, which are vastly superior (aesthetically) to the closed captions that Funimation used and HIDIVE still does (though some people do prefer closed captions along with the dub).

Of course, the other big question is how this will affect the price of the service. Now may be the best time to lock in a Crunchyroll subscription. For the time being, a yearly subscription is a little less than half the cost of Netflix (HD).

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, netflix, sony, streaming

AMC Networks has purchased Sentai Holdings, which includes Sentai Filmworks and HIDIVE. The AMC Networks portfolio includes IFC Films, Acorn TV, Shudder, Sundance, and BBC America (with the BBC).

AMC Networks ($1.6 billion market cap) is no Sony ($128 billion market cap), but this should give HIDIVE slightly deeper pockets. Maybe AMC's half ownership of BBC America will lend it some additional negotiating clout.

And while we're at it, Cinedigm is acquiring Digital Media Rights, the parent company of the RetroCrush, AsianCrush, and Midnight Pulp streaming services. Consolidation continues apace in the anime streaming business.

A big question for 2022 is whether Sony will continue to operate Crunchyroll and Funimation as separate subsidiaries or merge them together.

Like Netflix, Crunchyroll uses embedded subtitles that are superior to closed captions both in terms of readability and the user interface. I would be happy to see all the dubs go to Funimation and all the subs to Crunchyroll.

Incidentally, the year-end special offer ended, but you can get a one year subscription to HIDIVE for four bucks a month, which is still a great deal.

Labels: business, crunchyroll, funimation, hidive, streaming, television

Radio Garden was created by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the design firms Studio Puckey and Moniker. It hosts over eight thousand stations from around the world and can easily navigate to anyplace on the planet.

You can save favorites and bookmark links. There are apps for iPhones and Android devices too.


Also online are the NHK Radio News archives (in Japanese) and J1 Radio. The three main channels on J1 Radio are J1 Hits (pop/rock), J1 XTRA (Heisei era hits), and J1 GOLD (Showa era hits).

Now that we're on the subject, Wave, Listen to Me! is sort of WKRP in Hokkaido. The anime can be streamed on Funimation. Amazon has the English translation of the manga published by Kodansha.

On that nostalgic note, let's conclude with "My Broken Radio" by Hideaki Tokunaga (lyrics here).

Labels: anime, funimation, japanese, manga, nhk, radio, streaming, technology

Okay, two.

Sony's Funimation Global Group finalized its acquisition of Crunchyroll from AT&T. In the North American market, that reduces the trio of Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE to HIDIVE and whatever brand name emerges from the merger. All we know from Funimation is that they intend to "create a unified anime subscription experience."

It will certainly be more convenient to access both catalogs at once with a single website and app (hopefully using the embedded subtitles model employed by Crunchyroll and Netflix), though the apps and websites are currently so different, I'll be curious to see how they pull it off.

But the real question for anime fans is what will happen to HIDIVE and its parent company, Sentai Holdings. As of January 2020, HIDIVE had 300,000 paid subscribers. Crunchyroll has 5 million. The merger with Funimation will double that. That's one heck of a Pareto distribution.

In 2019, Sentai got a $30 million cash infusion from the Cool Japan fund, peanuts compared to Sony's $10 billion net profit in 2021. The U.S. Justice Department raised antitrust concerns when the acquisition was announced, so Sony might refrain from taking over the entire anime streaming world simply to avoid raising all those legal hackles.

Although it kind of already has.

Unlike specialized streaming services and other content providers, the Sony group blankets the entire anime sector: Aniplex is a production company; Sony Interactive Entertainment sells PlayStation; Animax Broadcast Japan is the country's largest fee-based anime channel; and Funimation is the biggest Japanese anime distributor in the U.S. Meanwhile, Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) has an exclusive label for anime songs.

According to the Otaku Entrepreneur, Sony now owns 86 percent of the market. A staggering 92 percent if you toss in Aniplex of America. Like Microsoft and Apple at the end of the 1990s, when Microsoft grabbed 97 percent of the PC market, it is in Sony's self-interest to at least keep the appearance of competition alive amongst the pure-play streaming providers.

One of HIDIVE's saving graces may be that Sony's domestic competitors in Japan won't want to pad Sony's bottom line and so may turn to providers like HIDIVE and Netflix. I think Netflix should do a content-sharing deal with HIDIVE. Or buy Sentai outright. Netflix has a good batting average with original anime content, and its catalog of licensed anime titles is top notch.

Together with HIDIVE, Netflix could become the Apple of anime. A smaller market share, but curated and high end, with an app that (almost) always just works.

For the time being, though, I am a spectator to these events, having unsubscribed from Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE. Netflix, Tubi, and dLibrary Japan alone provide me with more content than I have the time to watch. But the more anime Netflix can acquire the better.

Related posts

Tubi update
Streaming Japanese
dLibrary Japan update

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, netflix, sony, streaming, technology, tubi

One of the running jokes on the Car Talk radio show was its "Capital Depreciation Fund," that guaranteed a "50 percent return." In other words, you stood to only lose half of the money you invested with them.

Car Talk is apparently where AT&T got its buy high, sell low strategy. Having already signaled its willingness to unload DirecTV at fire-sale prices, subsidiary WarnerMedia's Crunchyroll turned out to be the first on the chopping block.

If the negotiations pan out, Sony will acquire Crunchyroll for a thirty percent discount from the $1.5 billion asking price, and turn Sony into an anime streaming juggernaut. Sony already owns Funimation, the second largest anime streaming service in North America, and anime production powerhouse Aniplex.

That leaves HIDIVE, the distant third of the "big three," as the sole independent anime provider in the North American market. And, frankly, HIDIVE could stand being acquired by a media entity with deep pockets and a major market presence too.

Though I think it's too early to cry monopoly. Netflix, for one, has been making a major push into anime, and not just with its Originals. Netflix licenses titles across the board and is forging partnerships with major Japanese anime studios like Kyoto Animation, Production I.G, Bones, and David Productions.

Sony's acquisition of Crunchyroll would give Funimation access to Crunchyroll's impressive backlist of titles and add Crunchyroll's significant international presence to Sony's previous acquisitions of French anime streaming service Wakanim and Australian streaming service AnimeLab.

Perhaps because Sony is getting even more serious about anime, my sense this season was that Funimation grabbed the lion's share of the best new titles. But I much prefer the way Crunchyroll (and Netflix) encodes its own subtitles rather than using the clunky closed captions favored by Funimation and HIDIVE.

My guess is that, if the deal goes through, Sony will maintain the companies as separate divisions while restoring the content sharing deal they had before being acquired by their respective multinationals. According to which, rather than duplicate efforts, Crunchyroll concentrates on subs and Funimation on dubs.

Even if Sony raised the price of Funimation to match Crunchyroll, it'd be worth it if you only had to subscribe to one to get access to the libraries of both.

Update: Pending regulatory approval, it's a done deal. Crunchyroll will be acquired by Sony's Funimation Global Group for $1.175 billion.

Related posts

Streaming the big three
(Almost) Live Japanese TV

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, netflix, sony, streaming

Long after politicians stopped worrying about Japan as an economic threat (and started worrying about China instead), Japanese popular culture is gaining an increasing mind share around the world, including in China. And yet getting access to Japanese live-action entertainment remains an uphill climb in North America.

Unlike anime, its own genre category on streaming sites such as Hulu, Tubi, and Netflix, Jdrama hasn't found a significant audience outside of Asia. Netflix has ten times as many Korean live-action dramas as Japanese live-actions dramas. DirecTV offers just three Japanese channels and over a dozen Korean channels.

Demographics has a lot to do with this. Korean-Americans (1.8 million) outnumber Japanese-Americans (1.4 million). Korean immigration peaked in the 1980s while Japanese immigration peaked at the end of the 19th century. The large home market for Japanese studios also lessens the need to compete abroad with Hollywood.

Japanese dramas and "unscripted" content (news, talk, and reality shows) are more popular across Asia, where Fuji TV distributes through Alibaba. Hulu/Japan is wholly owned by Nippon TV (the highest-rated network in Japan) and reaches 19 Asian markets.

The Big Three (Crunchyroll, Funimation, HIDIVE) keep their anime offerings up-to-date, and simulcast new series every season. But when it comes to live-action titles, "new" means released in the last decade. Over the past year, Crunchyroll has aggressively pruned its live-action catalog (once the largest) to two dozen titles.

Netflix is the only streaming service actively increasing the number of localized non-anime listings. Alas, little of the content on its Japanese service (like all of the Tora-san movies) is available in North America, where most of the live-action series are "Netflix Originals" rather than content from the domestic networks.

As a result, the only legal way to stay up-to-date with Jdrama has been TV Japan (via Comcast and DirecTV) and Nippon TV (via DirecTV). TV Japan carries a curated selection of shows from NHK and the commercial networks, scheduling episodes soon after being broadcast and some within a few hours. News is carried live.

It can do this because, aside from Cool Japan, sumo, and one nightly news program, TV Japan (and Nippon TV) localize almost none of the content. In language acquisition terms, TV Japan and Nippon TV are "immersive." You experience the content the same way you would in Japan (unfortunately sans most of the domestic commercials).

dLibrary Japan now offers that experience as a streaming option. (And now Rakuten Viki is is competing at the same price point with an emphasis on Jdrama based on manga and anime.)

If you are serious about learning Japanese, a necessary step is immersing yourself in a wide variety of Japanese programming (including Radio Japan). If culture is your primary interest, NHK World is an accessible guide (and includes news and sumo). It's free, mostly in English, and along with streaming, broadcasts OTA in many markets.

NHK World even carries the occasional scripted show, like Home Sweet Tokyo, an amusing educational sitcom about an Englishman who moves to Tokyo with his family to live with his widowed father-in-law.

You can (and should) watch a lot of subtitled anime. But for a true immersion experience and access to a largest catalog of live-action Japanese television available to audiences in North America, the only legal streaming solution is dLibrary Japan from NHK Cosmomedia (which also distributes TV Japan and NHK World).

When it first debuted, dLibrary Japan was full of promise but little substance. Its catalog was threadbare and it had none of the major apps. But at the end of September 2019, dLibrary Japan gave its home page a much needed makeover and announced that "New programs will be available every week from October!"

It has followed through with that promise. Along with the Google Play and Apple TV apps, dLibrary Japan added Roku support at the end of January 2020. Now they're getting serious.

At $9.99/month, dLibrary Japan is a dollar more than Netflix's lowest cost tier and two dollars more than Crunchyroll, both of which have bigger catalogs (by orders of magnitude), so I count it as a "premium" provider.

But let's compare and contrast the streaming services. I paid $42.00 (total) a month for TV Japan from Dish. When TV Japan left Dish for Comcast and DirecTV, the cost for the most basic international package including TV Japan almost doubled. That's when I cut the cord. Here's what I'm paying now.

Netflix	$6.99/month	$83.88/year
Crunchyroll	$7.99/month	$79.99/year
HIDIVE	$4.99/month	$47.99/year
dLibrary Japan	$9.99/month	$119.88/year
NHK World	free

The yearly total comes to $34.64/month ($37.95 month-to-month). A ginormous amount of content for six bucks less than what I paid for TV Japan on Dish, and a third the price of the full Japanese package (TV Japan, Nippon TV, NECO movie channel) from DirecTV. That's the big difference that streaming can make.

Related links

dLibrary Japan (user experience)
dLibrary Japan (content)
dLibrary Japan
dLibrary Japan Roku app
NHK World Roku app
Nippon TV and NECO

Labels: crunchyroll, demographics, directv, dlibjapan, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, jdrama, k-drama, netflix, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, nippon tv, streaming, tv japan, viki

My "big three" are the three streaming services that feature localized Japanese content, almost entirely anime, front and center. To start with, subscription rates roughly reflect overall market share and the number of titles in their catalogs.

HIDIVE	$4.99/month	$47.99/year
Funimation	$5.99/month	$59.99/year
Crunchyroll	$7.99/month	$79.99/year

By comparison, Netflix's basic SD plan is $8.99/month ($12.99/month for HD). Hulu with no ads is $11.99/month. HBO Max will debut at $14.99/month.

I'll be discussing how they well the big three run on the Roku Express platform (3900X and 3030R), together with their browser-based queuing systems. So keep in mind that I'm only reviewing what I use, not the capabilities of these services on all the available devices.

When everything is working the way it should, Crunchyroll delivers the best video experience on the Roku. Alas, its bigness has caused load balancing problems in the past, resulting in forced resolution downgrades, which rendered it basically unwatchable. In the words of Yogi Berra, "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

I only observed this during live streams or same-day updates to popular series, and I haven't found myself in that situation of late. In any case, if AT&T intends to replace its satellite service with streaming, it had better be able to handle the traffic.

HIDIVE occasionally encounters similar problems that have resulted in a hard crash of the Roku app. Even under normal conditions, HIDIVE has a video quality glitch where it can take a minute for a stream to ratchet up to the correct resolution. The same thing happens when using the Roku Replay function.

Again, this is most apparent under high load conditions. The HIDIVE Roku app otherwise runs well, despite having only been released this year. HIDIVE does have some irksome design issues (not technically bugs). For example, having to log into the website every time you reopen the browser. Crunchyroll and Funimation time you out after a week or so.

On HIDIVE, you can create up to three profiles per account. But the app is missing a line of code that says, "If there's only one profile, don't ask to select a profile." The result is a useless extra click every time you access the app. This bug was fixed on the website.

HIDIVE and Funimation mostly use closed captions instead of true subtitles. Crunchyroll encodes each language-specific stream with its own set of pre-rendered subtitles or dub track. Pre-rendered subtitles look and display better, and don't randomly switch the language settings between episodes, which the Funimation Roku app does far too often.

This happens occasionally with HIDIVE too, though on HIDIVE this glitch seems to be tied to the encoding of specific videos.

The Crunchyroll approach can get confusing because each encoding is treated as a separate title. You have to be sure to queue up the right one or the Roku app can end up spinning its wheels and never playing the video, probably because of a DRM or language setting conflict.


Another downside is the occasional cryptic message: "Sorry, due to licensing limitations, videos are unavailable in your region." In most cases, it simply means that one of the video streams (usually Russian) is not licensed for North America, not that all the videos are unavailable in the North American market.

Crunchyroll has the best browser-based queuing system. The Crunchyroll queue reminds me of the Netflix queue (using "Manual Ordering") and that's a good thing. It's just the queue and a recent history list, with an absolute URL that can be bookmarked. You can add, remove, play, and organize titles using "send to top" and drag-and-drop.

You can only add and remove titles from the HIDIVE queue, and it does that well enough. But HIDIVE generates the queue dynamically on the home page, where it plays hide and seek amidst the promotional material. The Funimation queue has its own page, except it is slow to load and often delivers you to a cluttered landing page instead of the queue.

C'mon guys, could you please just copy Crunchyroll? Or Netflix?

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Streaming the big three (a little background)
Streaming the big three (comparing content)
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Labels: anime, anime lists, business, crunchyroll, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, netflix, streaming, television

Crunchyroll is the biggest kid on the block, with the most content in every category. The most titles, the most user comments, most user reviews (both in terms of quantity and quality), wide-ranging forums, and a blog. Like Amazon, when it comes to discoverability, it's worth checking Crunchyroll even if you're going to watch someplace else.

HIDIVE recently took steps to catch up in terms of user-generated content by partnering with MyAnimeList and integrating the MyAnimeList rating system into its listings. Funimation has a decent review section for most titles. Funimation and HIDIVE use their blogs to announce new titles, while Crunchyroll actively covers the whole industry, making it a daily read.

HIDIVE offers a bit more granularity in its search filters than Crunchyroll, though you have to remember to apply the filters in a stepwise left-to-right fashion. And you can only search on titles. Funimation has a useless filter option once you drill down to the genre categories, useless because you can only select the genre categories you're already in.

Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE acquire all the content they can afford, so practically any anime worth watching makes it to the North American market. Crunchyroll wins the quantity race with its emphasis on subs. Funimation and HIDIVE compete in the dub space. In many recent cases, Funimation ended up with the dub and Crunchyroll with the sub.

Right now, I have the most saved shows (bookmarked or in my queue) in Crunchyroll, followed by HIDIVE (lots of classics), with Funimation trailing in third place. To be sure, Funimation has must-see titles like Hyouka, Robotics;Notes, Assassination Classroom, Spice and Wolf, and Snow White with the Red Hair, so it's not easily passed over.

The recent consolidation of Sony-owned Aniplex of America (and its subsidiaries) under the Funimation banner should expand and extend the Funimation anime catalog.

With the smallest catalog of the three, HIDIVE leverages its relationship with Sentai Filmworks to give its catalog the look and feel of a curated library. This "quality not quantity" approach includes many of my favorite Kyoto Animation franchises, such as Clannad, Beyond the Boundary, Tamako Market, and K-On.

As noted previously, licensing and content sharing deals are as fluid as the tide in this business, so Funimation ended up with earlier Kyoto Animation titles like Full Metal Panic, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Kanon.

HIDIVE also has Strawberry Marshmallow, Makoto Shinkai's Garden of Words and the outstanding Patlabor franchise, including the three full-length movies, that are less mecha movies than traditional police procedurals. Patlabor WXIII deserves mention in the psychological horror and monster movie genres as well.

The geopolitical anachronisms (and magneto-optical drives) notwithstanding, the original Patlabor series (especially the first season) holds up well. Thanks to being originally mastered on film, it looks great after thirty years.

Sentai Holdings, HIDIVE's parent company, recently garnered a $30 million investment from the Cool Japan Fund, a public-private partnership the Japanese government uses to promote cultural outreach. This support should help to cement Sentai's unique status as an independent licensor of Japanese anime not owned by a big multinational.

Crunchyroll has the biggest live-action catalog of the three but is systematically letting its licenses lapse (sadly including outstanding series like Antiquarian Bookshop, Hero, and Galileo), and now has only a few more titles than Funimation. If you're an Ultraman fan, Crunchyroll still has five full series.

Most of Funimation's live-action content are movies (which adds up to fewer hours of actual content). Four Japanese titles worthy of attention are Shinobi, Goemon, Assassination Classroom, and Space Battleship Yamato.

HIDIVE has the most eclectic lineup, ranging from two seasons of an AKB 48 reality show to Lone Wolf & Cub and Samurai Punisher from the 1970s and a Godzilla flick from the 1980s. For the older tokusatsu demographic, two series, two movies, and a special from the samey but enjoyable (in measured doses) Garo franchise.

Then there's the misleadingly titled 100 Sights of Ancient Cities, which is about traditional Japanese arts and crafts. Tabiaruki from Iwate is the kind of travel show you'd expect to find on NHK World. I'm a little puzzled about how HIDIVE ended up with these titles but they do make for a nice change of pace.

Of course, you don't subscribe to these services for the live-action offerings. It's all about the anime. Thankfully, the big three don't make you buy a pig in a poke. You can search their catalogs without subscribing and bookmark the URLs for shows. Funimation and Crunchyroll have "free" ad-supported options and HIDIVE has selected "free" episodes.

In any case, the subscriptions are reasonably priced. On an annualized basis, you can get all three anime services for the cost of HBO Max. Or maybe you'll just get HBO Max (that will include Crunchyroll). I'm sure that's what AT&T is hoping. Oh, and toss in HIDIVE too. It's the best value buy and has an impressive backlist of oldies but goodies.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, business, crunchyroll, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, netflix, nhk world, sony, streaming, television

That's Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE. The biggest streaming services—Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, to name three—all have substantial anime libraries, demonstrating the mainstream acceptability anime has garnered in the last decade or so. But at my "big three," Japanese content (mostly anime) makes up 99 percent of their offerings (the remainder going to a handful of Chinese and Korean productions).

Crunchyroll was acquired by WarnerMedia in 2018. It has exclusive access to Kadokawa titles and is a majority owner of distributor Viz Media Europe (along with the Hitotsubashi Group).

Funimation has been in the anime localization and distribution business since 1994 and is now owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment. It has a content sharing arrangement with Hulu.

HIDIVE was independently incorporated from the assets of Anime Network Online, and remains the exclusive streaming distributor of select titles from Sentai Filmworks and Section23.

How the big three compete in what nevertheless remains a niche market shines a spotlight on the evolution of the streaming business. Netflix in particular made its mark as a one-stop shop, a repository of what Chris Anderson christened a "long tail" library of everything for everybody. But especially in streaming, both upstarts and veteran Hollywood movers and shakers are challenging the one-stop shop model.

Netflix again becomes the case in point, with WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal taking back the rights to Friends and The Office. Half of Netflix's most-viewed content is owned by Disney, which is launching its own streaming service. Hence all the billions going to in-house productions. As Justin Fox observed back in 2015, everybody wants to be HBO these days, including former long tail poster child Netflix.

On the other hand, former Amazon Studios strategist Matthew Ball argues that the market can only fragment so far before that fragmentation becomes self-destructive to the aims of the content providers.

There's an ongoing balancing act going between content providers, who want to drive the most viewers to their branded sites, and production companies, who want the most eyes watching their shows. That tension doesn't go away even when the site and the production company are the same entity. As Netflix illustrates, we've entered a shaking out period.

Each of the big three has exclusives with distributors and content developers, so the only way to (legally) access most anime in the North America market is to subscribe to all three. But they also have to maintain deep enough catalogs to make a subscription worth the bother. That means shared content on top of content sharing deals. Though the deal making can have curious consequences.

If you end up on a title page at Crunchyroll with no videos attached, well, that's what happens when media businesses get divorced (though I appreciate that Crunchyroll preserves the stubs).

And just to make things that much more interesting, Crunchyroll is joining the lineup of HBO Max, the new streaming service from AT&T (which owns HBO and WarnerMedia). All well and good, but this raises questions about the future of VRV (which is anchored by Crunchyroll) and its content sharing deal with HIDIVE. Oh, if you're curious about what happened to Friends—it ended up on HBO Max.

As has the Ghibli Studios catalog. If nothing else, AT&T has deep pockets.

Netflix and Amazon (annoyingly) continue to acquire anime exclusives to entice subscribers to buy into the rest of their offerings. Hulu has a "first look" content-sharing deal with Funimation. But with Amazon divesting itself of Anime Strike (some of whose assets were acquired by HIDIVE), at least in North American, the anime streaming universe seems to have comfortably divided itself among the big three.

I have no idea where this business is going in the long term, especially with AT&T (which owns DirecTV) publicly proclaiming its preference for streaming over satellite distribution. We're in the middle of a sea change and the channel is crowded with many tiny schooners and fleets of huge tankers all trying to grab the least-obstructed course to an open sea of media consumers.

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Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, directv, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, kadokawa, netflix, sony, streaming, technology, television

As I've discussed in previous posts, back in early 2018, TV Japan (née NHK Cosmomedia) abandoned Dish and made DirecTV its exclusive satellite provider. But with the price of an a la carte subscription from DirecTV or Xfinity almost doubling from $40/month to over $70/month, I decided it was time to "cut the cord" and go over-the-top at a fraction of the cost. Seriously, Crunchyroll + Funimation + HIDIVE = less than $20/month.

The old-school content delivery model has since gotten turned on its head. Just three years after buying DirecTV, AT&T doesn't want to be in the satellite business anymore. "We've launched our last satellite," John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, stated in November 2018. AT&T chairman Randall Stephenson chimed in that AT&T was essentially "done" with satellites, and was "investing very aggressively" in OTT distribution.

The DirecTV NOW streaming service has already been re-branded as AT&T TV NOW (not to be confused with AT&T TV). Nobody would be surprised at this point if AT&T sold its satellite business to Dish. A lot has change since a proposed acquisition of DirecTV was shot down by the FCC in 2002. Dish would gain a subscriber base competitive with cable. And I would enjoy the irony of TV Japan leaving Dish only to end up back on Dish.

NHK Cosmomedia depends on satellite service to reach a worldwide market outside of North America and to provide programming to its legacy customers and hotels that cater to Japanese businessmen and tourists. To be sure, NHK Cosmomedia has diversified its distribution network, with TV Japan available on Xfinity nationwide. But cable television faces the same competition from streaming (though Internet-only is a profitable business).

This is hardly news to NHK Cosmomedia. NHK World has streaming apps for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku. Two years ago, NHK Cosmomedia launched dLibrary Japan, essentially a VOD service for TV Japan. But it has slow-walked the roll-out, and I mean at a turtle's pace. Aside from its web-based player, Chromecast came out a year ago and Apple TV is the most recent addition. Those apps constitute less than 20 percent of the market.

Both apps have been poorly received, the biggest complaint being the lack of content. If you're going to charge $10/month, you'd better be at least in the same programming universe as services like Hulu, Netflix, and Crunchyroll that charge less.

NHK Cosmomedia is naturally predisposed to favor its satellite and cable subscribers. And seems to be proceeding as cautiously as possible while waiting for another shoe to drop somewhere. A classic case of what Clayton Christensen calls the "Innovator's Dilemma," according to which companies put too much emphasis on the current business model and fail to anticipate or adopt new technologies to meet future needs.

Though AT&T may be trying too hard to adopt new technologies to meet future needs and has ended up aimlessly flailing around instead.

Though perhaps NHK Cosmomedia saw the writing on the wall and are using the roll-out to collect data about the technology and the user base, in anticipation of adding TV Japan to the platform. TV Japan targets exactly the kind of niche market that streaming was made for. Should the moment arrive that NHK Cosmomedia can't figure out where AT&T is headed next, streaming is one way to take a good deal of uncertainty out of the equation.

After all, NHK Cosmomedia already has NHK World, a proven live-television streaming platform. At the end of September, dLibrary Japan gave its home page a much needed makeover and announced that "New programs will be available every week from October!" so maybe they are finally getting serious. Though "serious" to me means a Roku app. So not yet serious enough.

For the time being, though, DirecTV provides the most almost-live television options to the Japanese language viewer, with a premium package that includes TV Japan, Nippon TV, and the NECO movie channel. That bundle costs $45/month plus a required "basic" package plus a boatload of taxes and fees. The whole thing would quickly add up to a cool grand a year.

Again, Crunchyroll + Funimation + HIDIVE = $21/month. Total.

Were money no object, the DirecTV package would be a no-brainer. But it is, so now I'm wondering whether AT&T can really back up all the big claims its executives are making about making DirecTV content available through a streaming set-top box. Then again, Nippon TV (the biggest television network in Japan) already owns Hulu/Japan. It may be the best positioned Japanese content provider to break out on the streaming front.

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dLibrary Japan
Nippon TV and NECO
Japanese media update
The streaming chronicles

Labels: business, crunchyroll, directv, economics, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, roku, streaming, technology, tv japan

So after a dozen years, I bid Dish a fond farewell. I must point out that the agent I spoke with was affable, courteous, and professional. If that's the norm at Dish in customer retention, my hat's off to them. Well done. I wouldn't have left if TV Japan hadn't left first.

TV Japan is why I subscribed to Dish in the first place. As I have documented in previous posts, in early 2018, TV Japan (née NHK Cosmomedia) abandoned Dish and made DirecTV its exclusive satellite provider. No explanation for only making their satellite service exclusive.

Family Gekijyo filled the empty programming slot. In Japan, Family Gekijyo resembles ION TV, its schedule consisting of a few original shows and a whole bunch of reruns. The problem is, Family Gekijyo in Japan in no way resembles the Family Gekijyo that Dish ended up with.

Perhaps Family Gekjyo is using the channel assignment as a placeholder for something else. Though it's more likely it underestimated the cost and difficulty of negotiating overseas rights for the content it broadcasts in Japan. Its Dish offerings are old, threadbare, and repetitious.

NHK, by contrast, has an annual operating budget of around $7 billion and an equivalent amount of political pull.

Which is too bad. Dish charged over thirty dollars less than DirecTV and Xfinity for a "limited basic" package plus a premium international channel. (If you're an Internet or cable subscriber, the Xfinity rate card can be downloaded here.)

A dozen years with Dish established my pain point at $40/month total for a single à la carte programming package. TV Japan isn't available on Xfinity Instant TV. The lowest-cost "cable box" package pushes the out-of-pocket to $75/month, and that's not including all the additional taxes and fees.

Almost $80/month to access a single channel? No way, no how. Frankly, even $40/month is too rich for my blood these days, especially compared to what streaming has to offer.

Crunchyroll is the biggest anime kid on the block and has the best website. Lots of reviews. Funimation has a smaller library but is the biggest licensee of physical media in North America. It's hard to pass over since the partnership with Crunchyroll ended and Funimation left with its exclusive content.

The thing is, these services are so affordable that subscribing to a couple will hardly break the bank.

Tubi is an ad-supported free streaming service with a surprising number of Japanese movies and anime. The ads can get samey but they are parceled out parsimoniously, they're not loud, and the ad engine is well-integrated. The overall viewing experience is superior to commercial TV.

For the time being, here's my list of go-to Roku channels:

 • Crunchyroll ($79.99/year)
 • HIDIVE ($47.99/year)
 • NHK World (free)
 • Tubi (free)

dLibrary Japan ($9.99/month) is how NHK Cosmomedia reuses content originally licensed for TV Japan. When it first launched, it charged too much for too little. But it's been steadily adding content to its catalog. Once it gets a Roku app, I'll kick the tires and drive it around the block.

Even with dLibrary Japan, I'll be nowhere near that $40/month threshold.

Related sites

Crunchyroll
dLibrary Japan
HIDIVE
NHK World
Roku
Tubi TV
TV Japan

Labels: crunchyroll, directv, dish, dlibjapan, family gekijyo, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, roku, streaming, technology, television, tubi, tv japan

TV Japan is a great service. It's the "Reader's Digest" of Japanese television, the only (legal) way to stay current with the best of scripted television (often rebroadcast within days), live and long-format news, and infotainment from NHK and the major commercial broadcasters in Japan.


But $24.99/month is a ridiculous price for a single channel. By comparison, HBO Now charges $14.99/month. And if you're going à la carte, you've got to fork out at least $25.00/month more for a "basic" package and additional fees. Even Xfinity Instant TV hardly saves you any money at all.

Fifty bucks for the one channel I want. And a couple dozen other channels I don't. Except they have me over a barrel so I just may cave. But I'll be grumbling about it the whole time (and get off my lawn!).

The thing is, we've been down this road before, paying through the nose for stuff we don't want in order to get the stuff we do want.

Let's stop and remember how the music business came up with the "cunning plan" of making its customers pay twenty bucks for the CD of an LP they already owned to get the two tracks they wanted. How did that work out? In the short term, like gangbusters. In the long term, it was a disaster.

According to the RIAA, American record industry revenues declined by two-thirds between 1999 and 2014, from an inflation-adjusted $20.6 billion to under $7 billion. Marc Hogan calculates that, in 2015 dollars, average per-unit album retail prices today are half of what they were in 1977.

It has not taken long for history to repeat itself.

The "bundle" is a plodding dinosaur designed to keep the cash-hungry cable model from going extinct. It's not working. As Luke Bouma reports on Cord Cutters News, in the third quarter of 2018 alone, Dish lost 367,000 subscribers, DirecTV lost 346,000, and Comcast lost 106,000.

While in its third quarter earnings report, Roku announced a 43 percent year-over-year increase in active accounts.

Granted, unless you are willing to rely solely on OTA content (which is a perfectly rational option), you'll need a broadband connection. Though these days, that's like saying you need electricity. Even calculating overpriced internet service into the equation, the savings are hard to ignore.

Compared to TV Japan ($24.99/month), Crunchyroll is $9.99/month ($99.99/year). Funimation is $5.99/month ($59.99/year) and HIDIVE is only $4.99/month ($47.88/year).

Toss in dLibrary Japan, TV Japan's VOD service ($9.99/month), and you'll pay for all four what you would for TV Japan on DirecTV or Xfinity, minus the fees. So about half. For four on-demand channels adding up to tens of thousands of hours of programming.

Not to mention that ad-supported streaming services like Tubi are free. And for Roku owners, so is the Roku Channel. And NHK World is free as a public service. I mean, if you've got to watch ads on a cable or satellite channel, shouldn't it be free too? Like OTA always has been?

In any case, there is no way the average cable subscriber can consume even a fraction of the content in the typical cable package. If "all or nothing" is the only option, maybe "nothing" is the choice we ought to be making. It's a choice more and more "cord cutters" are actively embracing.

Which is no doubt one reason why, going forward, AT&T (which owns DirecTV, HBO Now, and Crunchyroll) plans to favor streaming for content distribution, with CEO John Donovan declaring, "We've launched our last satellite."

Donovan and other AT&T executives said the rampant growth of Internet-delivered video services that bypass satellite and cable networks is so significant that it is now the company's future.

A streaming version of DirecTV will reportedly be less expensive as "there is no need for crews to come to your house and install a dish." Hey, unless those cost-savings simply accrue to DirecTV's bottom line, how about knocking twenty bucks off the price of TV Japan? That'd get my attention.

On the other hand, perhaps this really is a "cunning plan." The argument here is that cable companies make better margins selling Internet service and would rather not be joined at the hip with the content providers. Though if 5G lives up to a fraction of the hype, that's no guarantee either.

Incidentally, Cord Cutters News and Cord Cutter Confidential are two good ways to stay up to date about the state of streaming services.

Related posts

Japanese media update
Streaming Japanese
Family Gekijyo

Labels: crunchyroll, directv, dish, funimation, hidive, hulu, nhk, nhk world, roku, streaming, technology, television, tubi, tv japan

Two years ago, Funimation and Crunchyroll partnered up to cross-license anime streaming rights. A lot has happened since. Crunchyroll was acquired by AT&T (via Warner Media). Sony Pictures purchased Funimation. The joint agreement "ended amicably" in October. Annoyed anime fans will have to purchase two subscriptions for the same content.

At least anime streaming services are reasonably priced. Satellite and cable, not so much. But several new options have emerged, with Xfinity now carrying TV Japan nationwide.

Back in April, TV Japan moved from Dish to DirecTV. Dish handed the slot to Family Gekijyo. Family Gekijyo is Japan's version of channels like MeTV that rerun "classic TV." It's only as good as the shows in rotation. A mixed bag compared even to Family Gekijyo's home network in Japan, the content on Dish is a pale shadow of TV Japan.

If it keeps improving, it might become an attractive addition to (not a substitute for) TV Japan. But after almost a year, I don't see that happening. Mark it down as a lost opportunity.

Though priced the same as TV Japan on DirecTV and Xfinity ($24.99), as an à la carte channel, Family Gekijyo on Dish is the better deal on paper. "International Basic" on Dish is $15.00/month. "Limited Basic" on Xfinity is $20.00/month and "Basic Choice" on DirecTV is $20.99/month.

Which, purely in economic terms, makes TV Japan's exclusive deal with DirecTV (for satellite service) all the more annoying.

TV Japan has its own archive service called "dLibrary Japan" that reruns select programming from its cable/satellite channel. If you already have TV Japan, you will have seen most of the content already. And dLibrary Japan doesn't stream live or almost-live content like sumo tournaments and news.

But at $9.95/month, it might be worth considering if you're not going to subscribe to TV Japan. NHK World carries (English language) news, NHK documentaries, and sumo tournaments (no dramas or non-NHK content) and can be streamed for free.

Speaking of NHK World, the Utah Educational Network now broadcasts NHK World in full on UEN 9.4. KUED 7.2 (PBS) and UEN 9.1 also carry half-hour segments from NHK World in their international news lineups.

Ideally, Family Gekijyo would join TV Japan and NHK World (already free as a public service) in a single Japanese-language package. Alas, that's not going to happen either. So I'll give Family Gekijyo another month or two, stream Crunchyroll, and watch NHK World the old-fashioned way.

Related posts

Streaming Japanese
Family Gekijyo
Sink or stream
Japanese media update (updated)
dLibrary Japan

Labels: anime, crunchyroll, directv, dish, family gekijyo, funimation, japanese tv, nhk, nhk world, roku, sony, streaming, technology, television, tv japan

In which I expand my Japanese media options with a Roku.

At minimum, switching from Dish to DirecTV (the new home of TV Japan) would add another ten dollars to the subscription price (at least $46/month plus numerous taxes and fees), on top of a new set-top box ($60) and a 24-month commitment (ugh).

A Roku Express costs less than $30 (no additional taxes or fees) and nobody has to commit to anything. Hey, I'm already saving money! The picture quality on my 720p screen is better than I expected, almost as good as a solid 1080p OTA signal (the gold standard).

Here are a few of the Japan-specific channels available on the platform.

NHK World is a remarkably complete news and information service. Many of the features are original NHK productions with English voice-overs or subtitles, including the all-important highlights during sumo tournaments. Frankly, NHK World alone justifies the cost of the Roku.

Even better, it's a free service, as is the Roku app.

The other big draw for me is Crunchyroll. The annoying ads can be removed for $9.99/month (or $99.99/year), a great deal for the biggest source of anime anywhere. Like Netflix, they use embedded subtitles, which is vastly superior to the closed captions approach.

A free ad-supported Roku channel worth adding is Tubi. It's got a well-stocked anime section, though the quality is all over the map and the search tools are entirely lacking.

The same thing goes for Tubi's surprising number of live-action offerings. which range from art-house films to schlocky tokusatsu series.

Now the sole remaining independent anime service, HIDIVE carries anime and a few live-action exclusives from Sentai Filmworks for $4.99/month. That leaves Funimation as Crunchyroll's only other competitor (Funimation has since acquired Crunchyroll), but for $5.99/month it'd hardly break the bank to get both.

At $9.99/month, dLibrary Japan is a VOD service run by NHK Cosmomedia (also responsible for NHK World and TV Japan). It licenses recent live-action content (some titles can be up to a decade old) for only a year or two, so there's no backlist to speak of. But the catalog is updated on a regular basis.

Most of the movies on dLibrary Japan are subtitled. Fewer of the television series are, and I've noticed an increasing use of machine-translated closed captions (that at times resemble an infinite number of monkeys trying to type Shakespeare).

Netflix is the latest streaming service to discover there simply isn't a big audience for localized Jdrama in North America. On the other hand, I am very impressed with the quality and quantity of the Netflix anime catalog.

That leaves Rakuten Viki as dLibrary Japan's only competitor, though the two services are aimed at quite different audiences, and Rakuten Viki employs an innovative approach to the challenge of subtitling.

Then again, Netflix recently added a kabuki play and a whole suite of filmed theatrical productions that take place during the late Warring States period. I imagine they initially licensed the videos for distribution in Japan and ended up with worldwide rights in the bargain.

Also free on Roku, J1 Radio streams popular Japanese music from the postwar Showa era up to the present.

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The streaming chronicles (2)
The streaming chronicles (3)
The streaming chronicles (4)
Anime's streaming solution

Labels: crunchyroll, directv, dish, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, jdrama, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, roku, streaming, technology, tubi, tv japan, viki

When I was in college in the 1980s, Japan was constantly in the news, and the news was mostly about economics and international relations. But aside from Godzilla movies and Kurosawa films, hardly anybody knew anything about Japanese culture.

Except it was inevitable that Japan would soon rule the world.

These days, Japan is only in the news because of natural or made-made disasters (like North Korea). Or the odd summit meeting. And yet foreign tourism to Japan has reached all time highs and Japanese culture has become ubiquitous outside Japan.

Sony recently purchased Funimation (the biggest anime distributor in North America). Netflix is pouring some of its billions into 30 original anime productions.

The 1964 Olympics focused on the modernization of the Japanese economy. The 2020 Olympics will focus on the internationalization of Japanese culture. Even as Japan gets eclipsed by China economically, it grows more powerful than ever culturally.

Eamonn Fingleton likes to argue that slipping into third place behind China was Japan's "briar patch" strategy to get the rest of the world to stop focusing on trade imbalances. As this Noah Smith Twitter thread shows, it has worked brilliantly.

Noah Smith tends to grossly overgeneralize when it comes to Japan (a bad habit among foreign correspondents in that part of the world). Though that is kind of the whole point. Japan can now count on the overgeneralizers overgeneralizing to its advantage.

Third place is proving not a bad place to be.

Labels: anime, economics, funimation, japan, politics, sony

As Dave Barry would say, it'd make a great name for a band.

A few months after applying Jack Welch's "Rank-and-Yank" model to its anime offerings, Hulu still has a ton of anime in its catalog. But like Netflix and Amazon, Hulu wants to turn itself into HBO, and so has dumped its "free" advertising-sponsored model.

That's not quite the right metaphor. Netflix wants to be HBO. Hulu wants to be Comcast. And with its recent deals with Disney and Fox, it's getting there.

I rather like the Hulu model (aside from it succumbing to the inexplicable compulsion to mess with a perfectly fine interface until it's useless), and I believe that streaming services are the future. I just don't want to pay for all of them. It's the new old periodical paradox.

Hence the attraction of a one-stop shop like Hulu as a DVR-in-the-cloud. It would certainly be cheaper than adding a DVR option to my Dish subscription. And a whole lot cheaper than the typical cable package. I plan on cutting the cord before getting the cord.

I could similarly rationalize signing up for Amazon Prime mostly for the free shipping option.

I've maintained my DVD Netflix subscription for the occasional new movie and old television series I missed. It's DVR-by-mail. (Never underestimate the bandwidth of the regular mail.) I have Dish to get TV Japan, an a la carte subscription.

Speaking of a la carte, Crunchyroll is an all-anime provider (with some Korean offerings). And no ads with a reasonably-priced subscription. The only hitch here is that while there's a lot of overlap, Hulu and Netflix and Amazon and Anime Network still have their own exclusives.

Thankfully, that list of exclusives just became smaller.

Funimation (the biggest anime distributor in the U.S. market) and Crunchyroll realized there was nothing to gain by fragmenting the market further and partnered up. Especially when Amazon and Netflix can dig some change out of the couch cushions and outbid them any day of the week.

In 2015, Netflix spent almost $5 billion on programming, Amazon a little more than half that. CBS spent $5.7 billion on television programming, while the Disney (ABC) and NBC media groups spent $12 and $10 billion respectively. A big chunk of that still goes to scripted shows.

(To give credit where it's due, Netflix is streaming the live-action series Midnight Diner. A live-action series! Hulu abandoned its live-action Japanese series.)

Crunchyroll has 20 million users registered though its "free" portal, and has also done a licensing deal with manga publishing powerhouse Kadokawa, which itself bought a controlling interest in Yen Press and partnered with Hachette.

Crunchyroll is capitalized at less than half a billion (by the Chernin Group and AT&T) and has one percent of Netflix's paid subscriber numbers. It's had to rely on strategic alliances rather than deep pockets, and pours its resources into a single market segment with a die-hard user base.

Funimation will still distribute to the rest. With Crunchroll, Funimation is essentially creating a "factory outlet" with a focus on the die-hard fans. Funimation will concentrate on dubs, Crunchyroll on subs and real-time streaming.

The only remaining problem is walled-garden exclusivity. The bite for me was that Netflix runs out of Hikaru no Go DVDs at episode 45, right in the middle of the big competition. And only Hulu had the whole series.

But all is not lost! Hulu handed its whole "free" ad-driven service to Yahoo. The service is called View. I'd swear they didn't even move it off the Hulu servers, just slapped on the Yahoo logo and updated the DNS addresses.

The Yahoo interface is rudimentary at best. If they've got a queue, I can't find it. But I will say this for Hulu: unlike Crunchyroll, its ad engine was pretty darn good and that's what Yahoo is using (again, Crunchyroll is worth a subscription to get rid of the annoying ads).

If Yahoo is serious about making View work, it could turn itself into the syndicated subchannel of streaming. Not a bad direction for the directionless Yahoo to go. In other words, a streaming channel that consolidates all of your favorite reruns on a single ad-supported site.

The goal, after all, is to wring every last licensing penny out of every last piece of IP. Streaming is probably the best way to do that. All Yahoo has to do now is make its service actually user-friendly. Which I fear may prove to be a bridge too far for Yahoo.

But at least I can watch Hulu exclusives like Matoi on Yahoo View, so we may have the makings of a working solution here for us penny-pinchers.

Related posts

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Sink or stream
The streaming scythe
Anime's streaming solution

Labels: anime, business, computers, dish, funimation, kadokawa, pop culture, streaming, technology, television, tv japan

What at first appeared to be a full-scale purge of anime at Hulu turned out to be a far less-drastic but systematic cull of low-rated titles. Live-action Japanese television series are pretty much gone altogether (as always, Korean dramas are alive and well).

So what threatened to be a ruthless application of the 80-20 rule ("Twenty percent of inventory accounts for eighty percent of sales") was more the lopping off of the bottom 10 percent. The way CEO Jack Welch once boasted of running General Electric.

I suspect Hulu will be repeating this "Rank-and-Yank" process on a regular basis. In other words, truncate the long tail and concentrate on hits. Or at least the midlisters and up. And let's be clear: including the midlisters and up, Hulu still has a ton of anime.

Incidentally, this is why Cosco has three times the earnings-per-employee as Walmart and thus can pay a higher base wage. Cosco carries about 4000 SKUs while Walmart warehouses a staggering 140,000. It costs big bucks to maintain that physical inventory.

When it comes to anime, Hulu wants to be more like Cosco. So does Netflix.

Or rather, more like HBO: produce a few shows that capture the cultural zeitgeist and backfill the rest with reruns of standard Hollywood fare. It's  about "narrow-casting" to the broadest possible audience. In other words, the subscription model since forever.

Rather than broadcasting a signal to the whole wide world and hoping a few percentage of available households tune in, send it instead only to the viewers who already have a vested interest in watching.

As the cable industry has long proved, if you can get subscribers hooked on one or two channels (or even one or two shows) and fiddle with the packages to hide the sunk costs, they'll stick around out of sheer momentum.

In his 2004 treatise on the subject (and 2006 book), Chris Anderson cited Netflix as an example of the long tail in action. Streaming would seem to bolster his argument. Except what Netflix really wants is a heavily curated long tail. That's not too long.

Justin Fox at Bloomberg confirms that

Today's Netflix and its "brand halo" seem to have a lot more in common with existing TV channels, most obviously HBO, than the back-catalog specialist that it was back in 2006.

I don't think Chris Anderson was wrong about the long tail, simply wrong about it aggregating under one roof, the exception being virtual department store retailers like Amazon and Walmart. But even those behemoths can't stock everything.

The long tale very much exists, except it's been it's been stretched and scattered across all creation. So it takes a bit of dowsing to find the viable concentrations of your particular ore.

One thing remains very true about Anderson's original thesis: going completely digital cuts inventory costs drastically. The marginal costs for adding each additional title or user are close to zero.

Which is why Amazon could build out its existing infrastructure and turn AWS into such a profitable enterprise. And why every new software play must somehow leverage the "cloud." The challenge is what to do with it, how to collect and collate all the content to fill it.

Sure, information wants to be free, but the licensors are still going to charge whatever the market will bear.

And there's no better way to get control over content licensing fees than to produce it in-house. Though as HBO has discovered, getting irrationally exuberant with that approach can lose you your shirt.

Netflix has already been the principal producer on several anime series, and adapted Matayoshi Naoki's award-winning novel Hibana for a series that will be shown in all Netflix markets. Here the advantage goes to streaming over the traditional cable model.

But for those of us not so much interested in the smorgasbord?

The past is prologue and streaming economics hearkens back thirty years when the average middle-class household had a dozen magazine subscriptions (not counting the catalogs). "Big tent" at one extreme, (extremely) specialized at the other.

Such as a newsletter just for the QX-10. My dad subscribed to one of those. Today it'd be a website.

Going forward, the streaming market in the U.S. will probably be left with Crunchyroll, Funimation and maybe Hulu as the major online anime distributors, with Amazon and Netflix providing a generous but more curated catalog.

At the end of the day, though, when everything shakes out, we'll still have orders of magnitude more choices than the bad old days of praying for a single new anime release to show up at Blockbuster.

Labels: anime, business, funimation, streaming, television

Mamoru Hosoda was briefly slated to direct Howl's Moving Castle but left after what really were "artistic differences." All for the better, as it turned out. Miyazaki took over and made a great movie. And now Hosoda is well on his way to matching his record.

Hosoda is one of the few directors I consider self-recommending: the name alone in the credits is enough.

If anybody stands to inherit Miyazaki's mantle, it's Hosoda, whose films rival Ghibli productions for their consistent quality, dramatic depth, a sheer entertainment value: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), Summer Wars (2009), and The Wolf Children (2012).

And this year, The Boy and the Beast. The description sounds like supernatural version of The Karate Kid: the bellicose, bear-like swordsman Kumatetsu takes Kyuta under his wing and trains him to be a fighter.


The setting is Shibuya in Tokyo, except that a connection to an alternate realm has turned this Shibuya into a kind of postmodern Narnia. (Blood Blockade Battlefield sports a similar premise, though in New York, so maybe we've got a sub-genre going here.)

Funimation has licensed the film for North America; it's scheduled to open in theaters in 2016.

Speaking of the Miyazakis, Goro Miyazaki's Ronia the Robber's Daughter, based on the children's fantasy novel by Astrid Lindgren, has been made available to international distributors. The series ran for 26 episodes on NHK between fall 2014 and March 2015.


The series is currently streaming on Amazon.

And speaking of Studio Ghibli, GKids is distributing Only Yesterday, Isao Takahata's 1991 slice-of-life melodrama, with voice-over work by Daisy Ridley, no less. (And GKids now lists Ocean Waves, the last Ghibli film to be released in the U.S., on its website too.)

Related posts

The Girl who Leapt through Time
Summer Wars
The Wolf Children

Labels: anime, funimation, gkids, hosoda, japanese culture, miyazaki, movies about japan, nhk, studio ghibli

Mamoru Hosoda started out his career working for franchise productions (Digimon, One Piece). With The Girl who Leapt through Time (2006), Summer Wars (2009), and now The Wolf Children (2012), he's proved himself one of the best and most original anime directors in the business.

The Wolf Children deserves a place alongside Miyazaki's "quiet fantasies" such as My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Whisper of the Heart. Like Miyazaki, Hosodo embraces the sentimental while avoiding the maudlin, communicating a deep sense of poignancy and loss that Miyazaki rarely achieves.

This is less the loss that comes from melodramatic tragedy (the father dies early on, in what is more of a preface to the rest of the movie) than the inevitable loss that comes from simply living a life to its fullest.

Hosoda has masterfully fused two fundamental concepts of Japanese aesthetics: wabi-sabi, the beauty of the old. Not that of antiques in a museum but objects allowed to age and wear in their natural settings. And awa're, "an awareness of impermanence or transience of things, and a gentle sadness at their passing."

This is a story about family, community, and coming-of-age in rural Japan, a part of Japanese society that is itself inexorably aging and wearing away. As he did in Summer Wars, Hosoda has taken a genre fantasy and moved it to the Japanese countryside (which, to much of his audience, is no less fantastical a setting).

The rural drama in Japan has become a genre of its own (a common variation is the island drama).

The best-known example outside Japan is probably Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro. A lesser-known Yoji Yamada classic is Harukanaru Yama no Yobigoe ("The Call of the Distant Mountains"). A wanted man on the run (Ken Takakura) is taken in by a widowed farmer's wife (Chieko Baisho) in Northern Japan.

In Home: Itoshi no Zashiki Warashi, struggling businessman Yutaka Mizutani gets transferred to the sticks. The traditional old house (similar to the one in The Wolf Children) he rents for his family turns out to be haunted by a zashiki warashi, the ghost of a child who brings good fortune to those who treat it well.

Like the zashiki warashi in Home, it's pretty much impossible not to read scads of metaphors into The Wolf Children. There's the obvious (little kids are wild animals), but Hosoda is tackling a much bigger theme: how the maladaptive adapt to societal norms. Or in some cases, how they simply choose not to.

Rarely has the truism that children grow up to pick their own paths in life been stated so unpretentiously and in such a heartfelt manner.

Thankfully, though, Hosoda doesn't let the "message" get in the way of taking the story literally either.


I saw The Wolf Children on TV Japan. It's been licensed by Funimation and is available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, fox and wolf, funimation, hosoda, miyazaki, movie reviews, movies about japan, science fiction, tv japan

I was finishing the final draft of Fox & Wolf when I read this review of Mamoru Hosoda's Okami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki ("The wolf children Ame and Yuki"). The similarities in the genre and even names caught my attention.

Yuki and Ami are fairly common names, though Ame is not. Hosoda's Yuki was born on a snowy day. My Yuki has a snow-white coat. Ami means "beautiful madder" (she's a red fox). Ame means "rain."

My Yuki was raised in the wilds of Hokkaido by her werewolf aunt. I imagine something along the lines of the short-lived 2001 CBS/SyFy fantasy series Wolf Lake, about a mountain town run by its werewolf inhabitants.

Yuki's mother and father also meet at college, though my Yuki's mother is the wolf, and her father is from an aristocratic family.

The plots are worlds apart. However, "as Yuki grows from pint-sized hellion to school-age girl, she decides she wants a more normal life" does describe my Yuki's character arc (though it's hardly a unique one).

In a sense, Okami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki explains what Ami's mom was trying to avoid by denying her daughter's fox nature. As a result, Ami doesn't confront the realities of her were-self until she runs into Yuki in high school.

Okami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki has been licensed by Funimation (no release date yet). Fox & Wolf is available now!


Hosoda previous two films, Summer Wars and The Girl who Leapt through Time, are also highly recommended.

Labels: fantasy, fox and wolf, funimation, hosoda, japan, japanese movie reviews, science fiction