Sony has been on an anime buying binge of late, having purchased streaming services Funimation and Crunchyroll, along with retailer Right Stuf, which were rolled into Funimation under the Crunchyroll brand. To top that off, Sony then set its sights on Kadokawa, a much bigger prize.

Kadokawa is one of the top three publishers in Japan, ranked slightly behind Shueisha and Kodansha.

In late 2024, Kadokawa and Sony confirmed reports that Sony was in talks to acquire Kadokawa. A buyout is not off the table, but effective as of January 7, Sony will instead take a 10 percent stake in Kadokawa (in newly issued shares) as part of a "strategic capital and business alliance."

Sony does not have a traditional publishing arm. As Sony Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki explained earlier this year,

Whether it's for games, films or anime, we don't have that much IP that we fostered from the beginning. We're lacking the early phase (of IP) and that's an issue for us.

Sums up the Financial Times,

Sony is betting on a multibillion dollar push into producing more original content, as part of a creation shift the Japanese tech giant hopes will win it a greater share of the three trillion dollar entertainment industry.

The alliance will give Sony first dibs on Kadokawa's enormous catalog of manga and light novels. In exchange, Kadokawa ends up with much deeper pockets that it will use for "creating, developing, and acquiring new IP." Collaborative projects being discussed include initiatives to adapt

Kadokawa's IP into live-action films and TV dramas globally, co-produce anime works, expand global distribution of Kadokawa's anime works through the Sony Group, further expand publishing of Kadokawa's games, and develop human resources to promote and expand virtual production.

Crunchyroll obviously stands to benefit from the deal too. The acquisition of Crunchroll made Sony the dominant anime distributor in North America, though with Hidive, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Tubi actively acquiring content, it can't be technically said to hold a monopoly position.

In publishing specifically, Kadokawa still has a huge competitor in the Hitotsubashi Group.

The Hitotsubashi conglomerate includes Shogakukan, Shueisha, Hakusensha and related subsidiaries, such as Viz Media in the United States. Given that Shueisha alone is bigger than Kadokawa (and together with Shogakukan is twice its size), the Kadokawa deal likely won't trigger any antitrust issues.

The bigger risk with these sorts of mashups is that the customer, responsible for the success of the enterprise in the first place, gets lost in all the bigness.

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, kadokawa, manga, netflix, publishing, sony

Back in 2016, Jason Thompson opined on Gizmodo that "Manga publishing is dying." Unable to adapt to New Media, "most Japanese publishers have no coherent digital strategy and the extra step of licensing [manga] in America makes them even slower to react to change."

Yeah, I know, hindsight is 20/20, but that bit of prognostication aged rather badly. In less than a decade, Japan's manga market practically turned itself upside down and is currently the most profitable it has been in thirty years.
The shift has been reflected in the content itself, from the traditional pen and ink approach depicted in Bakuman (2013) to digital drawing tablets in Sleeper Hit (2016) and Eromanga Sensei (2017). By 2022, the digital manga market in Japan was twice the size of the print market.

I once bought Japanese manga from Honto. To take advantage of Honto's more affordable shipping rates (compared to Amazon-Japan), the entire process took about a month. Now Honto no longer stocks and ships paper books and I can get Japanese manga from BookWalker instantly.

Customer convenience is only half of the equation. Industry observer Haruyuki Nakano notes that

For some years now, publishers have been switching emphasis from traditional publishing to the rights and IP business. Shueisha had income of ¥51.1 billion for nondigital publishing in the period from June 2023 to May 2024, compared with ¥72.0 billion for digital publishing and ¥75.3 billion for business including publishing rights and sale of goods.

Hence Sony's interest in acquiring Kadokawa. Having Kadokawa under the same corporate umbrella would let Sony tap into the licensing income streams while eliminating the need to shop for content on behalf of its studios and streaming services. Because Sony would already own the IP.

Successful businesses adapt to new technology and the evolving marketplace. Traditional publishers like Kadokawa and the much bigger Hitotsubashi Group remain powerhouses in the industry. Japan's keiretsu can't turn on a dime. But once they get their bearings, it's full steam ahead.

Publishing is publishing, regardless of how the content gets distributed.

To paraphrase Seth Godin, they figured out they were in the storytelling and information business, not the newsprint business. Compared to magazines, higher quality tankoubon (print digest) sales have remained fairly robust.

Physical media is seeing a decline in video as well. Panasonic and Sony haven't updated their Blu-ray player lines since 2018. Samsung stopped making new players in 2019. LG stopped manufacturing Blu-ray players altogether. When the current inventory runs out, LG will not restock.

But just as vinyl LPs are still being pressed, there will be an ongoing demand for DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. And I am also sure that print books will outlast them all.

Labels: anime, bookwalker, business, crunchyroll, ebooks, japanese tv, kadokawa, manga, publishing, sony, viki

The two major pure-play anime streamers in the North America market are Crunchyroll and Hidive. Netflix is active enough in anime to place third, but a distant third to Hidive, while Hidive places a distant second to Crunchyroll.

That's how dominate Crunchyroll has become in the anime world.

Some of my all-time favorite titles, such as Insomniacs After School, Made in Abyss, Girls und Panzer, Patlabor, Beyond the Boundary, Beautiful Bones, Tsurune, Clannad, and The Demon Girl Next Door debuted on Hidive. More recently, though, Hidive has been abandoning licenses as fast as it is acquiring new content.

Patlabor, for example. One of the best mecha series of all time. A true Mamoru Oshii classic. Gone without a trace.

As a result, the second seasons of Call of the Night and The Dangers in My Heart are the only recent titles on Hidive that have caught my interest. Separately, Netflix and Hidive don't have big enough anime catalogs to justify staying subscribed for more than a few months at a time.

With Crunchyroll, by contrast, the ongoing challenge is combing through the next season's lineup every quarter and deciding what not to watch (because I simply don't have the time).

Since entering the anime licensing arena, international distributor Remow has embraced a go wide philosophy that includes sharing content on Tubi. Remow partnering with Hidive is the stuff MBA theses are made of, but I'm not sure how plausible it would be from a bottom-line business perspective.

My solution to this problem is for Netflix to buy Hidive and combine their anime catalogs under the Hidive brand (using Netflix's streaming architecture). Netflix would preserve Hidive as a standalone pure play for subscribers like me who aren't that interested in anything else on Netflix besides anime.

Netflix could feature popular Hidive titles on its own service and Hidive would benefit from access to Netflix's licensing and production teams.

Too many players in a niche streaming market works as much to the detriment of the consumer as too few. But I doubt the FTC would condone Sony buying yet another anime distributor on top of what has become the Crunchyroll colossus.

Netflix acquiring Hidive would bring some competition back into the anime market without forcing anime fans to sign up for yet another streaming service. Netflix's platforms are much better and Netflix could inject some fresh blood into Hidive's dwindling catalog with content from its own backlist.

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

A scene in episode five of Spy x Family makes use of a reel-to-reel video tape recorder sitting under the television in the living room. At first, I was sure it was an anachronism. But a little research revealed that the technology existed in the 1960s when the series takes place.

Sony introduced the CV-2000 video tape recorder (VTR) in 1965 as part of its home electronics line. At the time, the CV-2000 retailed for $695. Adjusted for inflation, that'd be $7000 today. I'm sure Lloyd put it on his expense account (which his handler complains about).

In Japan, the initialism VTR is still used to refer to prerecorded video content on broadcast television (even though it's all digital by now).

Labels: anime, business, history, japanese culture, japanese tv, sony, tech history, technology, television

Many of the Japanese historical dramas on Tubi are distributed by Samurai vs Ninja. As the name makes clear, it focuses on action-oriented Edo period movies and series. I got to wondering who came up with such a great name and dug up the following.

The service launched in 2023 as a joint venture between international distributor Remow and Nihon Eiga Broadcasting, which also runs its own pay TV channel for historical dramas. Samurai vs Ninja is active in forty countries around the world.

The corporate vision statement on the Remow website sums up the underlying problems with Japanese content distribution that have been brought into stark relief by the soaring popularity of Kdrama. Well, somebody finally decided to do something about it.

We hear more and more about Japanese productions being viewed around the world. However, the number of platforms on which Japanese titles can be viewed is limited. The truth is that many users all around the world are viewing pirated copies rather than using legitimate platforms. Japanese entertainment is an expression of our culture and our identity, and we want to deliver this entertainment culture to the people of the world along with the identity of our thoughts and feelings.

Remow has identified a chronically underserved market (while NHK Cosmomedia invests in a vanishing niche with Jme TV). Samurai vs Ninja is a work in progress though I have to wonder if its appeal might prove too narrow. Maybe add "Cops vs Yakuza" to the mix next. And lean harder into licensing.

I expect that Sony will end up being taught as a case study in business schools for wisely resisting the siren song to launch its own branded streaming channel. It already owned Aniplex, an anime production and distribution company, and then purchased two established anime streaming services.

Sony subsequently merged Funimation and Crunchyroll into a worldwide operation under the Crunchyroll brand. It didn't have to spend the time and resources building the whole thing from scratch with untested original content.

Owning a bunch of content doesn't matter much if nobody knows about it and can't access it. To its credit, the Samurai vs Ninja YouTube channel is jam-packed with sample episodes and promotional material. Although for now, aside from the website, the only streaming apps are for Android and Apple.

Related links

Samurai vs Ninja (official website)
Samurai vs Ninja (YouTube channel)

Labels: business, crunchyroll, history, japanese culture, japanese tv, jme, nhk cosmomedia, remow, samurai vs ninja, sony, streaming, technology, tubi

With dLibrary Japan offline until April 2024 (at the latest), it's once again time to reshuffle my Japanese language streaming choices. Tubi and NHK World Japan are free, so no decisions to make there.

Viki goes into watch and drop rotation. No complaints about the service itself. To start with, it's eminently affordable. It's a content mismatch. The Japanese content focuses on BL and romance. Frankly, when it comes to romance, Jdrama simply doesn't measure up to manga and anime.

I prefer police procedurals, low-stakes slice of life dramas, and documentaries, which Japanese television writers are much better at pulling off.

Viki has a few in that category, just not that many. But speaking of which, I see that Viki has licensed 99.9 Criminal Lawyer. It's a well done execution of the reliable formula that pits an eccentric defense lawyer against his uptight boss (a corporate lawyer because it pays much better).

And while I'm at it, I'll again point out that Viki has Sleeper Hit, a fun, insightful, and even philosophical examination of the manga publishing world and the hard-nosed business of selling art.

In any case, as with pretty much every streaming service that doesn't focus specifically on Japan, Viki's Jdrama offerings take a back seat to its Kdrama series (true of Tubi and Netflix too). But if that is what you're looking for, Viki is one of the better overall sources for Asian content.

Unfortunately, take away dLibrary Japan and Viki and there aren't that many viable Jdrama alternatives left. When TV Japan was alive on traditional cable, it added up to eighty (!) bucks a month for a single channel on Xfinity. Not an option when I cap my monthly streaming budget at twenty dollars.

Tubi has a few Jdrama series and (subbed) Japanese movies worth watching. It sure doesn't make them easy to find. But a little effort will occasionally turn up genuine classics, campy tokusatsu series (featuring primitive CG effects and guys in rubber suits), and recent releases like Blue Thermal.

At least for now, that leaves Netflix as far and away the best of the remaining Hobson's choices.

Anime, by comparison, offers an embarrassment of riches. Thanks to Sony's acquisition of Funimation and Crunchyroll, Crunchyroll rules the anime streaming world. You could watch Crunchyroll all day long and not make a dent in the huge backlist before getting swamped by dozens of new titles.

The annual subscription option makes Crunchyroll an even better deal. On price alone, HIDIVE is the most affordable anime streaming service but is so much smaller that it's hard to justify an annual subscription anymore.

I've been following Princess Principal and Girls und Panzer on HIDIVE. Both franchises have moved to the theatrical model. This wouldn't be a problem if they were releasing standalone movies but they're actually serials. What we end up with are regular series produced at a glacial pace.

I'll wait until a season is over before watching it. I'm very much on board with the old Netflix approach of releasing a whole series at once. Even on Crunchyroll, I watch a season behind the current schedule. The added benefit is that makes it easier to figure out which series are worth the time.

While waiting for titles to accumulate, HIDIVE joins Viki in the watch and drop category. Once I run out of live-action content on Tubi, I'll shift to Viki and then to Netflix. Netflix uniquely provides Japanese subtitles for much of its Japanese content, a very valuable language learning resource.

Related links

NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
Crunchyroll
HIDIVE
Netflix
Rakuten Viki
Tubi

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, dlibjapan, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, manga, netflix, nhk, nhk world, sony, streaming, technology, tubi, tv japan

The Shogun miniseries debuted on NBC on September 15, 1980. It ran for five consecutive nights and a total of 12 hours, garnering the highest weekly Nielsen ratings in the history of the NBC network.

Two months later Ronald Reagan would be elected in a landslide. A year later, IBM launched the IBM PC. Japan had the second largest economy on the planet. Japanese automakers were leaving Detroit in the dust and Sony was the Apple of its day. Serious people were seriously predicting "Japan as #1."

(And I was studying Japanese at BYU.)

By the end of the decade, Sony Corporation owned Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center. Only seven years after that, Mitsubishi lost a billion dollars on the deal and sold off its controlling interest. The real estate bubble burst and Japanese fell into a decade-long recession.

(And I was teaching English in Japan.)

But at the time, Japan was the China of today, with a critical difference being that Japan was and remains a stalwart ally of the United States.

So credit NBC with great timing. But also credit the network for broadcasting a pretty good product. Based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell and starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune, Shogun gave its American audiences a westernized version of a classic NHK Taiga historical drama.

Meaning "big river," the Taiga is a big-budget (by Japanese standards) hour-long drama that runs from January to December. Each year it tackles the life of a notable historical figure. This year, the 16th century female clan leader Ii Naotora; next year, the 19th century general Saigo Takamori.

Unlike Shogun, the Taiga drama strives for sufficient accuracy to use everybody's real names, and does its best to faithfully recreate well-documented events. Though with forty or so hours to fill, a healthy amount of fiction will inevitably backfill the scarcer stuff that historians are confident happened.

Taking place after the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1598 and before the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Shogun is mostly fictional filler. But the miniseries does nail down the time frame and the principal characters, and does a reasonable amount of justice to the historical context.

Richard Chamberlain's John Blackthorne is based on a real person. Will Adams was the English captain of the Dutch-flagged expedition. Confined to a single year, at the end of which Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated Ishida Mitsunari at Sekigahara, Shogun can't help but downplay what a fascinating figure he was.

It also downplays the cruelly ironic turn of history that would take place in his lifetime. Every indignity suffered by the Protestant sailors at the beginning of Shogun would be visited upon the Jesuits a hundred fold. One explanation for this reversal of fortunes is made clear in Shogun, and another is alluded to.

Made clear is the geopolitical insult of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which "divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between the Portuguese Empire and the Crown of Castile." The reason alluded to was Portuguese involvement in the mid-16th century trade of Chinese and Japanese slaves.

Restrictions on Catholicism in Japan began in earnest under Ieyasu's predecessor, Hideyoshi. Shogun mostly ignores this to keep the Jesuits around as the bad guys. It became a draconian ban under Ieyasu's son, culminating in the systematic annihilation of the Christian community after the Shimabara Rebellion in 1638.

Martin Scorsese's Silence (based on the novel by Shusaku Endo) explores this at length (if you can stomach two hours of man's inhumanity to man vividly illustrated).

Along with the suppression of Christianity, the Edo period of Tokugawa rule was characterized by a strictly-enforced sakoku (isolationist) policy. But Ieyasu did employ Adams to negotiate limited trading rights with the East India Company and the Dutch, though they were confined to a small port off the coast of Nagasaki.

Until the mid-19th century, information about the outside world trickling in from Europe became known in Japan as rangaku (蘭学) or "Dutch learning." Though it was an Englishman that made it happen.

Shogun is not without its anachronisms, stereotypes, and soapy subplots. But as a Hollywood version of Japanese history, it does an all-around better job than The Last Samurai or 47 Ronin. Not merely a noted moment in television time, some forty years later, Shogun stands up well to a second viewing.

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Labels: japanese culture, japanese tv, movies about japan, nhk, pop culture, shogun, social studies, sony, television, television reviews

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

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.

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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.

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

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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Streaming the big three (a little background)
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The streaming chronicles

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

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.

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

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

I don't think it a stretch to say that Japan's sakoku ("national isolation") period from the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century never really ended. It just lightened up a bit (after Matthew Perry and Douglas MacArthur took turns prying it open with the crowbar of military might).

The U.S. remains one of only two countries Japan has a formal extradition treaty with (the other being South Korea). But even that distinction can prove fairly meaningless, especially when it comes to civil matters and white-collar crime in particular.

For example, in divorce cases involving a foreign national, Japanese family courts will almost inevitably favor the Japanese party, regardless of what ruling a foreign court may hand down (which occasions no little bitterness on the part of divorced foreign nationals).

Following WWII, the Occupation forced the dissolution of the family-controlled vertical monopolies called zaibatsu. However, the zaibatsu soon reassembled themselves as the ostensibly more benign keiretsu.

During the economic boom times of the 1950s and 1960s, nobody on either side of the Pacific cared. But then came the rise of the Japanese auto industry and the fall of Detroit. U.S. law, in the form of the Sherman Antitrust Act, frowns on the keiretsu concept, especially in the auto parts industry.

The National Law Review reports that since 2010, "More than 30 companies [auto parts industry] have pleaded guilty to antitrust violations and paid approximately $2.4 billion in criminal fines." And while some guilty executives have "subjected themselves to U.S. jurisdiction,

Others appear to have taken the gamble that the DOJ will not be able to extradite them. In truth, it may not be such a bad gamble in light of the fact that the DOJ has yet to extradite a Japanese national for crimes committed under the Sherman Act [emphasis added].

Extradition treaty or no, Japan just isn't big on the concept for common criminals either. In an in-depth post on the subject, the Turning Japanese website wryly observes that,

An additional "benefit" of becoming legally Japanese [and being a Japanese citizen] is that you're protected (so long as you're on Japanese territory) from facing the justice system of other counties. If you do commit a serious crime overseas, and are arrested in Japan, you will face the courts of Japan and face punishment inside Japan.

What wrongdoers will face in Japan is the equivalent of the "village stocks" from Colonial days.


Public acts of contrition are de rigueur for public officials and titans of industry who get caught doing the wrong thing (or wrong things happening under their watch). Japan doesn't have "show trials" (no cameras in the courtroom during the trial). They do have "show apologies."

It's a very pro forma ritual. The guilty Pooh-Bahs, dressed like they're attending a funeral, stand in front of a swarm of reporters and television cameras and bow deeply. It's the Japanese version of the "perp walk."

Sony executives apologize for the 2011 PlayStation data breach.

After which it's common for the guilty parties to disappear from sight until they have "repented." In Japan, prison sentences across the board are spartan and severe (bail and parole are rare) but far shorter than in the U.S. (For truly heinous crimes, the death penalty is still applied.)

Essentially, they are metaphorically banished to Mount Koya.

Mt. Koya is renown as the home of the Buddhist Shingon sect (if you're in Osaka, it's worth a day trip). For a millennium it was also where defeated warlords and disgraced officials could "retire" instead of losing their heads. (And it's the setting for Serpent of Time.)

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Labels: economics, japan, japanese culture, law, sony

Donald Trump is the American Shintaro Ishihara, the main difference being that Ishihara has a higher-brow resume. An award-winning writer, director, and all-around raconteur, Ishihara got into national politics in the 1960s and was governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012.

Which proves that intelligence and literary talent are not obstacles to becoming a motor-mouthed blowhard.

Ishihara's monumental ego is only the first of their many shared similarities. He told Playboy in 1990, "If I had remained a movie director, I can assure you that I would have at least become a better one than Akira Kurosawa."

Although attached to far right causes and called "Japan's Le Pen,"
Ishihara, like Trump, is really a "Know Nothing" nativist. Trump's most outrageous remarks about immigrants differ only in geographical terms from those of Shintaro Ishihara.

If you think Trump is a bull in a china shop, in April 2012 Ishihara offered to purchase (out of his own pocket) the contested Senkaku Islands and lit off an utterly unnecessary and dangerous international incident with China.

Recall as well that Ishihara was co-author with Sony chairman Akio Morita of the nationalistic screed, The Japan That Can Say No. Ishihara just wants to make Japan "great again."

Believe it or not, Trump is not nearly as impolitic in his public statements as Ishihara. It's hard to imagine Trump describing women past a certain age as "useless" (though his marital choices suggest so). And unlike Ishihara, Trump has yet to insult the French.

At the time, Ishihara's outrageous declarations never seemed to cost him in the polls. Nevertheless, the political factions he headed steadily lost ground and he left politics in 2014.

It's easy to argue that a more circumspect Ishihara could have become prime minister. But a more circumspect Ishihara would never have attracted such a brilliant spotlight.

The same goes for Donald J. Trump. A subdued Trump would have turned into Michael Bloomberg, get elected mayor of New York, and slowly fade away. Fourteen years Ishihara's junior, at the age of 69, this is Trump's last shot at seizing the brass ring.

The possibility doesn't worry me in the slightest. Unless it's 1861 or 1941 or you're living in Syria right now, spare me visions of the impending Apocalypse. The British burned down the White House and most of Washington in 1814. We got over it.

Among the Republican candidates (and Hillary), Trump's "Prime Directive" approach to foreign policy is the only one that makes sense. Not that much else of what he says makes sense (especially trade policy), but, hey, you take what you can get.

If Trump does get elected president, we're going to see the checks and balances of the American Constitution put into action, which makes it possible for Congress to accomplish a great deal by doing nothing (which it should do more often).

And if he manages to blow up the GOP in the process, all the power to him. Perhaps Trump is just the man to convince the political left as well that a less powerful federal government, and especially a less powerful chief executive, is a good thing.

Labels: japan, japanese culture, politics, sony