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Originally Posted by bayoab
Except the way most people are watching it is completely different in many different ways from the way Japanese viewers are consuming it. I agree with Vexx's point that they need to make it available, but the problem is it is too widely available illegally. There are some anime episodes on youtube with view numbers that would make a company have the #1 selling DVD of the year if even 1% of those people bought it.
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Actually in Sunrise and Bandai's case they are making their recent shows as available as possible as soon as possible legally by attempting to simulcast with series and movies pre-dubbed in both English and Japanese and in some cases other languages. Not to mention efforts to make their shows available on various popular streaming sites and the PSN either for fair prices or for free. The reason they and other groups like Ghibli and Toho want to cut down on fansubbing seems simply to be that they don't want it to cut into their own legal efforts to provide subbed and dubbed series in other territories, which I can kind of support as reasonable. Especially since Bandai Visual is now closed down with it's awful Japanese market prices that they were attempting to sell to American Consumers
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Originally Posted by Last Sinner
The industry is starting to doing that at the moment, though. Bakemonogatari intentionally didn't fill all the scenes on its screenings. K-ON! had intentionally lowered picture quality and altered scenes. Recent shows like Sacred Blacksmith and Saki are intentionally censoring and promising uncensored versions on the DVD/Blu-Ray releases. Bake and K-ON! had the biggest first volume sales in Japan this year thanks to those gimmicks (56k and 41k respectively). Sacred Blacksmith rose from the 1100s to the 200s on Amazon pre-orders positioning after news of an uncensored release. The industry is wisening up somewhat. They are beginning to come up with ways to make people buy their product.
That said, whether this gimmick will work in the long term is yet to be seen. The only series in the last few weeks that has had notables DVD sales is Hetalia Axis Powers, which has consistently hit around 20k sales each volume, which is a fair achievement considering almost any series this year has struggled to crack 10k in that format. K-ON!'s latest volume struggled to reach 5k. Would be interesting to see some accurate Blu-Ray numbers but the two competing firms don't like to show numbers much, only positioning. Notably, the majority of Bake and K-ON! sales have been on Blu-Ray.
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If this is true (and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that K-On had yet another gimmick attached to it's name) then I think it would be the entirely the wrong way to go about an anti-piracy effort for the global market even if it appears to be commercially viable for the Japanese one. People shouldn't be denied the full product as a protective measure, but should have the best possible product with the most options for obtaining it legally made available to them in their region ASAP. Again I realize that otaku don't necessarily care about that sort of thing and will buy anything they like at exorbitant prices, but I'd love to see the same thing pulled in the Region 1 market and how well it goes over.