Anime on Hulu: Do you watch?

[bigsocce]

http://www.hulu.com/channels/Animati...Cartoons/Anime

There are 21 anime available to watch from Astro Boy, Death Note, Naruto, School Rumble, Bleach to Speed Racer. All are legal and free. The anime studio gets about 70% of the ad revenue generated. (read that about 70% of the Hulu ad revenue go to pay for the contents).

I heard that Hulu will go international in 2009 so if you're outside the USA, it will come to your country soon.

My review: It's great. This is the future of television. Not on TV but online. As for the picture quality, the 480p in full screen is as good if not better than the fansub avi in full screen. There are 3 thirty seconds ad per 22 minutes episode but I can live with that. One thing though some anime are dubbed and some are subtitled or both.

Streaming rights to the subtitled version of this series aren't available at this time, but we will continue to pursue both dubbed and subtitled versions of all anime series.

Watching School Rumble right now and I'm loving it. Just not digging the dub.

[Claude]

It's a lot better than anything I'll ever get on my television, but this is the internet after all... The fact that it is totally legal is the only reason I'd be drawn to it. Some of my friends can't read subtitles very well so they will probably like the dubbed episodes a lot.

[bigsocce]

Hopefully, they will get more anime and in subtitle format.

If so, no need to download fansubs anymore

[cuteycindyhoney]

No need to download fansubs?
That's crazy-talk!

Originally Posted by bigsocce

Hopefully, they will get more anime and in subtitle format.

If so, no need to download fansubs anymore

[bigsocce]

Originally Posted by cuteycindyhoney

No need to download fansubs?
That's crazy-talk!

If hulu put up the anime I want to watch, I probably won't download fansubs. The quality is just as good and I don't to look and download the anime.

[othera]

Though i like DLing anime, my bandwidth disagrees....

I remember my friend telling me about this(he was watching deathnote iirc) and i will probably check out school rumble

[SeedFreedom]

I would, if Hulu was available where i lived.

[musume_no_hoshi]

I'm much too spoiled by HD, softsubs, muliple track that fansubs provides

Even if the fansub is in SD, I still use ffdshow to do a simple 'upscale', which makes the quality slightly higher. But I might check out the older shows, such as School Rumble. And I would feel better for supporting the company. (I might end up just watching the episode twice, once in nice pretty HD so I get the full enjoyment then the Hulu version to support the company? I doubt it'll help the company much ...)

And I highly doubt alot of anime are going to be international. Maybe the popular stuff, such as Naruto or Bleach. Which I clearly don't watch. I watch more of the niche, 'otaku' or shoujo stuff.

[N-Bomb]

Originally Posted by musume_no_hoshi

Even if the fansub is in SD, I still use ffdshow to do a simple 'upscale', which makes the quality slightly higher.

Do you understand what you're saying here??? You're taking nothing and doing something to it and out the other end comes nothing!

You know that you can't magically add detail or 'quality' to a video source, right? I mean come on, this is simple elementary school knowledge.

Please, everyone: think before you open your mouth. Failing that, please educate yourself on the basic fundamentals of things or keep quiet so you don't look like a fool.

[Solafighter]

Very interesting page.

[PEDOS_GRANDE]

Originally Posted by musume_no_hoshi

I'm much too spoiled by HD, softsubs, muliple track that fansubs provides

Even if the fansub is in SD, I still use ffdshow to do a simple 'upscale', which makes the quality slightly higher. But I might check out the older shows, such as School Rumble. And I would feel better for supporting the company. (I might end up just watching the episode twice, once in nice pretty HD so I get the full enjoyment then the Hulu version to support the company? I doubt it'll help the company much ...)

And I highly doubt alot of anime are going to be international. Maybe the popular stuff, such as Naruto or Bleach. Which I clearly don't watch. I watch more of the niche, 'otaku' or shoujo stuff.

YOU. CANNOT. GET. MORE. DETAIL. THAN. IS. THERE. IN. THE. FIRST. PLACE.

This is the 2nd thread like this in the past week now.

MHD IS NOT HD.

[bigsocce]

Did some research and found the following:

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/hulu_ad_bargain

Want to advertise on a network TV show on the Web? Try Hulu. It's cheaper to run ads during "The Office" on Hulu than NBC.com.

We spoke to a media buyer who said ad rates at Hulu are in the $25 to $30 CPM range, or cost per one thousand impressions, while rates on NBC.com are $35-plus. (NBC co-owns Hulu with Fox.) The catch: you can't buy individual shows on Hulu, just demographics across many shows.

Hulu's ad rates are still higher than network TV, but that's a pretty big come-down from the $60 to $70 CPM range we were hearing about earlier this spring.

$30 per ad per 1000 impressions, which translate to 3 cents per ad per viewer.

Each anime has 3 ads, so the total revenue per one viewer is 9 cents for each episode.
Hulu keeps about 30% and the content provider gets the other 70%.


70% of 9 cents is 6.3 cents. So everytime you watch an episode on hulu, you contributed 6.3 cents to the anime industry and 2.7 cents to hulu.

Assume 26 episodes anime and each episode is viewed by 100,000 people. The revenue the anime company would get is: 6.3 cents x 100,000 viewers x 26 episodes = $163,800. If there are 1 mil anime fans and they all watch, the total revenue is $1.638 million

Does anyone know how much it cost to license a moderately successful anime like True Tears, Kannagi?

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by bigsocce

Assume 26 episodes anime and each episode is viewed by 100,000 people. The revenue the anime company would get is: 6.3 cents x 100,000 viewers x 26 episodes = $163,800. If there are 1 mil anime fans and they all watch, the total revenue is $1.638 million

Does anyone know how much it cost to license a moderately successful anime like True Tears, Kannagi?

Let's be realistic and take your average successful over BT 13 ep anime which gets 30k hits per bt and lets say 50k total. This would net you 33k. This is about the cost to license one or maybe, if you are lucky, two episodes of a 13 ep series.

[bigsocce]

Originally Posted by bayoab

Let's be realistic and take your average successful over BT 13 ep anime which gets 30k hits per bt and lets say 50k total. This would net you 33k. This is about the cost to license one or maybe, if you are lucky, two episodes of a 13 ep series.

You forgot that there are various ways to get fansubs

-bittorrent through the fansub site and animesuki
-bittorrent through mininova, piratebay etc...
-direct anime download sites like fansub tv
-sites that link to megaupload, rapidshare, send space
-IRC
-limewire and Direct Connect

Add all those up, I wouldn't be surprised if some anime like Gundam and Claymore are downloaded and viewed over half a million people.

What do you think the anime studio prefer?

$150,000 or more from streaming anime with ads as an alternate for fansubs
or nothing because people download fansubs and contribute nothing

[Kamui4356]

Originally Posted by bigsocce

You forgot that there are various ways to get fansubs

-bittorrent through the fansub site and animesuki
-bittorrent through mininova, piratebay etc...
-direct anime download sites like fansub tv
-sites that link to megaupload, rapidshare, send space
-IRC
-limewire and Direct Connect

Add all those up, I wouldn't be surprised if some anime like Gundam and Claymore are downloaded and viewed over half a million people.

What do you think the anime studio prefer?

$150,000 or more from streaming anime with ads as an alternate for fansubs
or nothing because people download fansubs and contribute nothing

You forget that those numbers are worldwide. Fansub numbers don't just come from North America, which is the market we're talking about for hulu.

I'd say bayoab's numbers are more realistic than yours, and even they seem rather optimistic to me. Though something is of course better than nothing.

[musume_no_hoshi]

Originally Posted by N-Bomb

Do you understand what you're saying here??? You're taking nothing and doing something to it and out the other end comes nothing!

You know that you can't magically add detail or 'quality' to a video source, right? I mean come on, this is simple elementary school knowledge.

Please, everyone: think before you open your mouth. Failing that, please educate yourself on the basic fundamentals of things or keep quiet so you don't look like a fool.

Thats why I added quote marks on 'upscale', because I know it's not upscaling, I just don't know what word to use. I know it doesn't magically add quality to it, but I just find it nicer on the eye, I prefer it to be blurred then blocky or have noise. I never said there'll be more details. Maybe it's just the way that I said it, I shouldn't have said the quality would be higher, it just looks easier on the eye, at least for me

Many people are talking about legal ways to replace fansubs. Fansubs always seems to have certain advantage, such as a choice of different subbing style (from different group, some may like a more literate sub, some may like a more localised sub), and it's nice to know that people who worked on your sub actually like anime (well I do know that some fansubber just sub for the sake of it). This is just an observation of mine. I noticed MKV and MK4 formats are usually only used by fansubs (okay MP4 is used more widely). Other Hollywood illegal downloads tends to be in avi/xvid. Fansub community seems to use newer video techology. Quoting this encoder friend of mine, he said something along the lines of 'I don't care if they don't know how to play H.264, it's none of my problem, I'll give them the link to cccp then that's it.' With a more commericalised legal way to distrubute anime, the people working on it would actually think about which formatts would be the best, the style of the translation and so on. The way fansubs work, gives each fansubber an indiviual style, which would please a certain group of watchers, which I would think is difficult to replicate with a commericalised way. Of course legal version has its own advantages, but I think most people would know them already.

Despite Hulu is going international, they're still doing IP for certain shows. Not just Americans download fansubs. I wanted to support Pretty Cure on crunchyroll, but of course it has to be region blocked, even for a show like Pretty Cure

When people know where is a legal way to watch anime on the computer, the anime thats shown on TV, like Naruto and Bleach would have reduced ratings. There might be lost of advertisement pay check, with less TV advertisement/ratings, the overall money lost could be greater then the adverts gained on Hulu. I have no knowledge about advertising system and so on, so it's just a guess. (After BBC iplayer is introduced in the UK, I know alot of people just give up watching the TV channel itself and just watch iplayer. Of cource the BBC is owned by the state, so ratings doesn't really matter.) Hulu could be targetting the fansub watching community, some may migrate, most likely the youtube fansub watchers, but some (like me) still prefer fansub. (I might aswell just download the fansub and then watch it legally afterwards so I do support the company)

[bigsocce]

Originally Posted by Kamui4356

You forget that those numbers are worldwide. Fansub numbers don't just come from North America, which is the market we're talking about for hulu.

I'd say bayoab's numbers are more realistic than yours, and even they seem rather optimistic to me. Though something is of course better than nothing.

I believe there are 100,000 people in the United States who watch an 'average successful' anime. (not 50,000 as bayoab stated). It's a country with over 300 million. Bittorrent numbers are from worldwide, but I wouldn't be surprised if North America make up about half of the fansubs downloaded.

The anime studio would rather their viewers watch anime legally with ads (or with subscription like Crunchyroll) than watching anime illegally with free fansubs.

The technology is still new but in a few years, the quality of Internet streaming for internet will be amazing. Right now, in 480p, the anime I am watching from hulu is as good as any fansub avi.

[OceanBlue]

I doubt it's 100,000 people solely in the United States for an 'average successful anime' [What is an average successful anime, anyway?], but I do agree that the amount of BT downloads for a series can exceed 100,000 and does for the very popular series.

Code Geass R2 is an extreme example, since it's very popular, but the number of completed downloads from Eclipse exceeded 200,000 in some cases, although they dwindled to exceeding 100,000 by thousands near the end.

Clannad from Eclipse, meanwhile, only gets around 30,000 - 50,000 average [not counting the downloads for the 16:9 versions, since most of those are probably people redownloading it].

Some Hayate no Gotoku! episodes from Eclipse [You can tell I only went to one site to check for information.] have exceeded 100,000, but that dwindled as the series went on [for obvious reasons for those who have watched it].

I'd have to agree with Kamui and bayoab. Clannad and HnG! are relatively successful, and they didn't get anywhere near 50,000.

[bayoab]

There's also the other big question: What does it cost to get your content on Hulu?
Clearly, it is very, very expensive. (More expensive than coding your own site.) You get the backing of NBC/Universal and all the normals wandering around it as your advantage though. However, with their payment model for ads, you clearly are paying a lot up front and expecting to make it back on hundreds of thousands of views.

(Also note from earlier: Most torrents only have 1 tracker that matters no matter how many sites they are on. Most sites do not do tracker rewriting. The biggest two sources of views currently are 1) BT and 2) Streaming sites. Everything else is tiny in comparison. And for reference: Code Geass gets ~225k Nielsen and 250k online streaming on [AS].)

[Vexx]

The problem I have with streaming is that I have to redownload the same blob every time I want to watch it. For the many people on transfer cap limitations.... this is a killer on enjoying any streaming. For those without caps -- then yeah this is a good thing but only if they go global and provide subtitles.

Many people seem to think streaming is somehow magical (i.e. does not transfer files) - it simply streams a file which some readers then discard rather than save for future re-use. There's no difference in transfer from a direct download.