Ask John: Will There Ever Be Online Pay-Per-View Anime?

Question:
The adult entertainment industry has given us the “movie on demand feature,” basically an area of a website where a member can select a desired movie from the site’s offerings then stream the movie to their computer. Is there anything out there like this right now for the anime front?

Answer:
While this seems like a great idea, I don’t foresee it ever becoming a reality for several reasons. Japan is very unlikely to support streaming anime over the internet because Japan is largely a country of narrow-band dial-up internet connections where low bandwidth, small files and text only websites rule the internet. Just as Japan largely doesn’t create anime specifically for export, it’s unlikely that any Japanese studio would create streaming anime files and go through the hassle of international billing just to market these episodes outside of Japan.

Rather than desktop or stationary internet connections, Japan focuses its internet development heavily on mobile cellular telephones, largely because in Japan a cell phone seems to be as common an appendage as arms and legs. There are already Japanese cell phones capable of displaying small color JAVA animations and playing color Gameboy games on small LCD screens.

It’s very unlikely that any American domain would ever try to market online pay-per-view anime because there’s too much room for bootlegging involved. Even if a program is made available in a streaming format, you can be sure that someone will find a way to crack it or hack the multimedia server.

Of course, I could be totally wrong on this prediction.