Anime Sols to Launch Domestic Anime Distribution
Japan’s Yomiuri Group news media corporation has announced plans to partner with anime studios Pierrot, Tezuka Productions, and Tatsunoko Productions to launch “Anime Sols,” a domestic anime distributor, next spring. Anime Sols will stream and sell traditional home video releases and merchandise based on studio owned anime series, allowing American consumers to directly support Japanese anime creation studios. The distributor will launch with Tatsunoko’s 1975 Space Knight Tekkaman and 2008 Yatterman TV series, Studio Pierrot’s 1983 TV series Magical Angel Creamy Mami, and Tezuka Production’s 1978 feature-length TV special One Million-Year Trip: Bander Book.
Anime Sols representative Sam Pinansky has explained:
It will work pretty simply (note: details may change)
We’ll stream classic anime with subtitles for free (ad supported), and allow people to pledge pre-orders of DVD sets, with various levels of bonuses for higher pledges. If enough pre-order money is pledged to meet the goal within the time limit, everyone is charged and we author the DVDs and send out the sets to everyone. Any remaining DVDs from the print run we’ll sell in normal web stores, assuming it’s profitable to continue printing them.
Any show which doesn’t meet the pledge goal within the time limit we’ll leave up streaming for a little while, but eventually we will replace it with new series to try and get support for that one instead. Anime Sols is not trying to be a giant library of classic streaming anime, but rather a place where people can watch and discover series to support and collect.
No one will be charged anything unless the goals are met and DVDs are produced, just like Kickstarter.
There is no paid membership, monthly fees, etc. Our business model is to sell these support packages and gather fans of these classic series to collectively raise enough pre-order money to make creating DVD sets profitable for the member companies like Tatsunoko Pro and Tezuka Pro. and Pierrot. Since the LLP is formed from these companies, a maximum amount of the profits go straight to the rights holders with no middlemen.
Source: Anime News Network & Source: Fandom Post
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This sounds really amazing up to the entire pledge thing. Essentially they’re running a Kickstarter for something that basically already exists.
Listen, Yomiuri Group, you have a pretty steep uphill battle ahead of you. First, you’re distributing shows that are pretty old, which limits the appeal drastically the the tend-demanding market of today. You’re also not placing your product in a traditional venue where fans can purchase it at their leisure. And like Kickstarter, fans are asked to pledge money and WAIT, and maybe we’ll get a DVD set sometime. Fans these days barely have the patience to let video buffer, which you are not offering indefinitely and instead will be cycling out titles, limiting even the stream service’s appeal.
I know the success of Proudction IG’s Kick Heart campaign has you seeing yen signs in your eyes, but I will be surprised as anyone if any of these series gets a DVD release. In either case, please make sure the subtitles are done by someone who has experience in English translation. We don’t need a Toei-style foul up again.
That said, where do I sign up?
I’m kind of irked, if you only get one glance at the show(s), and it gets taken down, and possibly never seen in the U.S. again. If they’re going to upload ’em, why not just get the ad revenue off ’em indefinitely?