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Digital initiatives like Crunchyroll's will probably work as an idea. After all, people are already watching either downloaded or streamed anime, so we might as well try to make some legal money out of it.
However, here's the problem: I don't believe that relying on digital distribution alone would be a sustainable business model. The reason is simple: Online viewers will not be willing to pay anywhere near as much as what they would pay for a DVD or a Blu-ray disc.
This is a problem faced by the entire mass-media industry — newspapers, radio, movies and TV — and not just anime. We can all see that online distribution works, but converting it into sustainable revenue is an entirely different problem altogether.
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