Quote:
Originally Posted by sa547
Among the opinions (some of which have devolved into the usual ANN arguments over the legality of subbing and its effects on the anime industry), someone in there blames the TV stations for the draconian agreements they lay out for the studios, insisting that the studios pay for such broadcasting. |
Although this is standard practice for late-night anime TV show, it's not the studios that have to pay for TV slots in Japan, the ones that pay for it are production committees.
This is how the anime business works:
1.) A production committee is a gathering of different sponsors from the entertainment industry who finance a given production.
2.) They hire production houses such as animation studios, sound studios et cetera, and other contractors such as seiyuu. They pay these people a one time sum for their services, forget royalties and all that bullshit.
3.) Then they pay TV stations money for a given timeslot. If you think about it, it makes sense because TV stations basically sell air time. Production committees then decide how they want to make use of it. As they can't get third-party sponsors for their production because everyday Japanese hate otaku, they fill their time slot with ads for products of all sponsors included.
Obviously, a different business model applies for anime aired in prime time. Those rely on profits from third-party advertisers that look at ratings.
4.) Production committees then recoup costs from media mix sales (DVD, novel, comic etc), merchandise sales, and other licences.
The real tragedy is that production houses get paid very little. These companies don't have strong labor unions, they're not rich to stand up in court against productions committees that forget to pay them, bigger production houses have to outsource a lot of work overseas, and even then their employees make a bare minimum. So the cycle of exploitation continues.