It was clear from the get go that this story lacked any genuine research. Children aren't the only consumers of anime and are certainly not the only target market.
People want to blame everything on file sharing, but that's bullshit. I don't know if the anime industry is actually suffering in Japan, but if it is, the fault is not on file sharing. Young people are constantly bombarded with more entertainment options so maybe anime just isn't shaping up. And the file sharing population of Japan is actually quite small, by Western standards.
If anything, the fault is on the myopic entertainment industry. They take forever to release stuff to other potential audiences (they don't even bother releasing stuff legitimately to China a lot of the time so naturally the Chinese have become used to only having pirated material) and it took them forever to recognize there was a market for their products in the US.
Horrible article. I couldn't even read all of it. Lazy reporting. (I only clicked on the transcript, not the video.)
It's kind of worrying that the journalist who presented the story apparently won an award for a previous story. And this is on what is normally a quite respectable current affairs program. It seems that when you do a story on anime, you just jump to the easy answers with a few shots of Japanese girls cosplaying.
Still, I thought you might find it interesting, if only in a car crash kind of way.
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People want to blame everything on file sharing, but that's bullshit. I don't know if the anime industry is actually suffering in Japan, but if it is, the fault is not on file sharing. Young people are constantly bombarded with more entertainment options so maybe anime just isn't shaping up. And the file sharing population of Japan is actually quite small, by Western standards.
If anything, the fault is on the myopic entertainment industry. They take forever to release stuff to other potential audiences (they don't even bother releasing stuff legitimately to China a lot of the time so naturally the Chinese have become used to only having pirated material) and it took them forever to recognize there was a market for their products in the US.
Horrible article. I couldn't even read all of it. Lazy reporting. (I only clicked on the transcript, not the video.)
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Still, I thought you might find it interesting, if only in a car crash kind of way.
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