Restriction on Blu-Rays: Is this true?

[Kirarakim]

Originally Posted by Lord of Fire

Maybe if anime was treated like any other TV show, ratings and advertising would make it possible to sell BDs/DVDs at lower prices. However, since it costs money to have anime aired on TV, that loss of money has to be entirely recouped by disc sales (and probably additional merchandise).

And I think it's safe to say that the Japanese collectors are not only fine with it, but wouldn't want it any other way. DVDs/BDs are collectibles to them, not so much media to watch and therefor worth every yen they invest in them.

But if you look at Outf0xzer0's post it is not just anime but entertainment media in general is expensive in Japan.

[SeijiSensei]

This is purely speculative, but maybe it has something to do with the known tendency of Japanese viewers to rent rather than buy. Usually this preference is tied to the much smaller living spaces of Japanese homes which makes it more difficult to maintain large collections of discs.

In the early days of home video in the US (Betamax and VHS), prices were much higher than today. Partly that had to do with early duplication methods, which largely consisted of dubbing tapes from one VCR to a bunch of others. That meant a two-hour movie took two hours to reproduce. However the other big reason was the existence of the "first-sale" copyright doctrine which requires the rights holder to collect all the royalties in the initial sale. After you buy a book, movie, CD, whatever, you can do as you like with it, including renting it out repeatedly to others. The rise of mom-and-pop video stores in the 1980s depended on this policy. However it also encouraged the studios to set a high price point for their products so they could recoup some of that rental income. If you sold a video cassette for $30 that would be rented out 40-50 times at $3 each, the rental store would make a profit of $100 or more on each cassette. Selling the cassettes at $80-100, which was common in the early days of home video, meant the studio would see a much greater share of that $150 or so of rental income. Over time as the market for home video grew, Hollywood discovered it could make more money by cutting the prices on its products and selling many more copies directly to consumers.

Japan may be more like the older American marketplace. If consumers have little interest in actually owning most of the movies they watch, then the Japanese distributors will set high prices on their products to extract as much value as possible from the rental companies.

I came across an interesting paper on the Japanese video industry that provides some support for my argument.

When rental stores lend music CDs to consumers, copyright license fees for the rentals are paid to copyright holders in proportion to the number of times that the CDs are rented. In contrast, for visual DVDs, in many cases, the license fees for the rentals are included in the price of DVDs shipped to rental stores and these fees are set at a fixed rate, regardless of the number of times the DVD is rented.

The author also observes that the average price per retail DVD in 2006 was 2,994 yen while the average charged to rental companies was 4,511.

However those figures are considerably lower than the prices Out0xZero reported above. Perhaps the Blu-ray market in Japan is still a niche composed largely of collectors willing to pay such high prices. The DVD price for the complete set of six Lord of the Rings DVDs is 7,850 yen at amazon.co.jp, or slightly under $100 at current exchange rates.

There's also the important fact that the Japanese distributors have a lot more control (read "monopoly power") over the market for product dubbed into Japanese. They are competing against English-only products from America, but those don't help people who speak only Japanese.

[MakubeX2]

Since nobody had mentioned this yet, I believe I should have the dubious honour to.

There's a Joker card that throws confusion in regards to the pricing of physical Japanese video release and that's the Porn industry.

New Porn DVDs releases are generally priced about 3000 yen or lower and that's before retailers' discount. A new Hollywood blockbuster can cost about 4000 yen or more on DVD.

Somehow, you would expect the Porn producers to pay a premium on watching young girls doing the nasty, but yet they are able to keep the pricing low and operate and still recruit and financed girls on a large scale to operate year after year. Even with the rental and 2nd hand market in place.

But there are a few possible explanations here that I can offer :-

1:- The cut throat competitions between the producers force them to keep prices low to remain competitive in order to keep their consumer base and everybody is happy. Especially for the consumers, if you get what I mean.

2:- Production cost for a Porn movie is actually a very small fraction of the cost of a Televison serial, let alone a blockbuster movie.

Thoughts ?

[SeijiSensei]

According to this, DVD and Blu-ray sales were estimated to total 80 billion yen in 2010, or roughly a fifth of the estimated 400-500 billion yen spent on porn, though that article says that the Japanese porn industry is in a bit of a slump right now.

I'm not sure exactly how the porn industry affects the prices for mainstream video releases, though. Are you suggesting that so much money is spent on porn in Japan that there's much less cash available to be spent on mainstream DVDs and BRs?

Still it is pretty incredible that some 2,500 new adult titles are released in Japan each month, or that perhaps one in every 200 Japanese women has allegedly appeared in a porn video.

The source of these figures is the tabloid Shukan Post, so some skepticism of their accuracy might be in order.

[MakubeX2]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

I'm not sure exactly how the porn industry affects the prices for mainstream video releases, though. Are you suggesting that so much money is spent on porn in Japan that there's much less cash available to be spent on mainstream DVDs and BRs?

No. What I'm trying to bring across is the strange fact that in Japan that Porn videos can afford a more competative pricing than more mainstream releases and yet their producers and publishers are able to operate years and years on end.