Ok so I decided to be a good guy and watch some TV shows with Japanese dubbing legally. After a brief search I found there are cards sold around in Japanese stores that you can use for credit on your Japanese iTunes account. So first I decided to create an account and browse a little to estimate how much money I'm going to spend. 10 minutes later I had my iTunes account set up, start browsing and there's NOTHING there!!!

No TV Shows of any kind (not to mention dubbed in J), Japanese artists are scarce and the selection of anime is 19 titles long... Prices are all bucked up too, for 18 year old C grade movie (http://itunes.apple.com/jp/movie/id419539063?l=en) they are charging 300yen for rental and 1500yen to buy it O_O

How am I supposed to go legal and buy anything from them if they don't have anything I want and are overcharging for things I could possibly buy? Old games on Steam go for peanuts and are still making money (sometimes significant) for their creators, whats so special about movie/music industry that free market shouldn't apply to them? I say if they want to hold on to their status quo and cling to their "its either our way or no way" attitude so badly, let them. But for now I'm going back to torrent sites, where no mafia dictates what, how and where can I watch stuff I like.

Because of licensing, there is a monopoly on distribution.

Isn't the cost of media (DVDs, games, blu-ray, CDs) already really high in Japan? I remembering lol-ing at that epsiode of Erin's Challenge where she goes to a CD rental shop..

The content publishers get to set the price, and they're basically going to set the same price as the RRP of the physical version (why charge less and get less profit?). In fact often they charge *more* for the digital version, as they believe users should pay for convenience (plus remember Apple take a large cut).

This issue is also killing e-books. you often have to pay more for the digital version than the hardback, even though the former you don't really own and therefore can't sell on.

EDIT: Games are different, as you can't go into a store and buy a 10-year old game. so selling it on Steam is basically free money for them.

thurd Wrote:But for now I'm going back to torrent sites, where no mafia dictates what, how and where can I watch stuff I like.

Genuine question - if you want to "go legal" and you live in Tokyo, why not just buy or rent DVDs and rip them yourself? There's likely to be several manga cafes and rental shops in your local area or area of work, and also probably a Japanese online rental service like netflix.

aphasiac Wrote:Isn't the cost of media (DVDs, games, blu-ray, CDs) already really high in Japan? I remembering lol-ing at that epsiode of Erin's Challenge where she goes to a CD rental shop..

The content publishers get to set the price, and they're basically going to set the same price as the RRP of the physical version (why charge less and get less profit?). In fact often they charge *more* for the digital version, as they believe users should pay for convenience (plus remember Apple take a large cut).

This issue is also killing e-books. you often have to pay more for the digital version than the hardback, even though the former you don't really own and therefore can't sell on.

EDIT: Games are different, as you can't go into a store and buy a 10-year old game. so selling it on Steam is basically free money for them.

I know downloads are more convenient but since there is basically no-cost of creating or distributing content through this channel, publishers should take this opportunity to lower the prices (gain new customers). Downloads are extremely beneficial for all those corporations, even without DRM and as we approach global economy their licensing deals are also a thing of the past.
NBA revises its policies each season and I applaud them for it. I've seen it go from no League Pass in Poland, through League Pass sold but games bought by Polish TV stations are unavailable (stupid shortsighted licensing) to League Pass being fully operational with no limits, that was the day I bought it and they profited greatly (content was already created, distribution channel is cheap so they basically generated money where there would be none otherwise). Another thing is impulse buy, I've a lot of games on Steam I bought on a whim and never actually downloaded (no time to play them) and I'm actually quite the conscious consumer compared to most.

In the old days you'd borrow a DVD to/from your friends but now everyone is so lazy that nobody even bothers hauling stuff on external hard disks, they all download!! I think if download was 1/3 of its current price (dictated by physical media) and actually available (in Poland there are still no big players like iTunes, Netflix etc. and our local ones have catalogs so short they're not even worth mentioning) nobody would even bother with torrents. Its absurd that I have the money, I want to obtain a legal product and nobody is willing to sell me one...

As for e-books it depends, on Amazon most Kindle versions I've found are about 2/3rds the price of softcover and I think it will get even less when Kindles become more popular.

aphasiac Wrote:Genuine question - if you want to "go legal" and you live in Tokyo, why not just buy or rent DVDs and rip them yourself? There's likely to be several manga cafes and rental shops in your local area or area of work, and also probably a Japanese online rental service like netflix.

Good question, its because I'm lazy and don't have a DVD in my laptop (my almost 4 year old desktop that I left in Poland has one but I've used it maybe 3-4 times during its whole lifetime and 75% of that is installing Windows).
If there is a Netflix alternative in Japan I'd most appreciate it, the bigger the catalog the better.

I'm very under-studied in the physical aspect of the internet, but could someone explain to me exactly what bandwidth is?

I mean, I know bandwidth is the packets going to and from one place to another. But why does it cost money to send and bring back? Theoretically, once the cables are in the ground, shouldn't there be an unlimited flow? I don't have to pay bandwidth charge to send data to my USB drive... and it's not like data needs gas to go to another place, just a charge.

Well, they have to store data on servers, which aren't some magical clouds in the sky but real buildings with rows and rows of computers, thus requiring power and maintenance and what not. To give an example of scale, Apple is currently building an additional server park on a lot of 500.000m2.
Likewise, sending data over the internet isn't magical either and while not requiring gas it does require electricity.

tokyostyle Wrote:

thurd Wrote:I know downloads are more convenient but since there is basically no-cost of creating or distributing content through this channel, publishers should take this opportunity to lower the prices (gain new customers).

This is a massive logical fallacy. Downloads may have less cost associated with them than physical distribution, but that cost is only a small savings and is nowhere near the level of no-cost. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Blizzard have sickening million dollar bandwidth bills every month.

I'm not saying its free, nothing is. But its not "small savings" for them, compared to the scale of effort and money needed to create a proper retail channel its almost nonexistent.

Compare this scenario, I want to sell my 10GB video I just recorded, if I take a regular route I'd have to arrange physical creation of discs & box/cover (buy/rent a fab), pay the price up front for each copy (cost), then I've to talk with stores across the country (or world) and arrange logistics everywhere (massive money drain) for this product.
Or I could just buy a 4x1TB disks for peanuts, make a 0+1 RAID from it (or whatever would be the best in this case) and connect it with some decent upload plan (good ones are not that cheap but still we're talking orders of magnitude cheaper), another alternative is to just pay for hosting (more expensive option but I just have to upload stuff and be happy).

As an individual its IMPOSSIBLE for me to arrange a retail channel because of costs and effort involved, but I can easily arrange to host files. The latter also scales well so in time as my business grows I can flexibly add bandwidth as I see fit.

Remember that all those corporations you mentioned and ISPs/hostings usually already have operations that require massive amounts of bandwidth and they design it to handle "peak" times well, for them its not a question of creating the infrastructure from scratch but rather expanding and/or intelligently using what they have. If they already built a nation wide network of datacenters (I believe Netflix has a machine in every major ISPs data center), adding some racks with discs to it is not a problem and bandwidth is getting better and cheaper all the time. When I started my Uni you could get max 128Kb/s broadband for around 40$, its 8 years later and the standard is 120Mb/s for the same price, the same goes for enterprise.

To sum up, no limit bandwidth hosting/shell account on rootnode costs 50e per YEAR, this best describes how much bandwidth is really worth these days.

thurd Wrote:As for e-books it depends, on Amazon most Kindle versions I've found are about 2/3rds the price of softcover and I think it will get even less when Kindles become more popular.

That's interesting. On my Kindle (locked to the UK amazon store) the digital version is usually the same RRP as the paperback or hardback. BUT the stupid thing is, amazon often discounts the physical version meaning the kindle copy ends up costing more.

thurd Wrote:As an individual its IMPOSSIBLE for me to arrange a retail channel because of costs and effort involved, but I can easily arrange to host files. The latter also scales well so in time as my business grows I can flexibly add bandwidth as I see fit.

This is actually what it comes down to - digital media pricing policy is mostly about keeping control of distribution. If e-books were sold at 1/3 of the retail books, no one would buy physical books anymore. Then once all books went digital, why would publishers or distributors be needed? Authors could just self-publish e-books and make 100% of the profit - actually this has already started happening with authors like Stephen King.

Currently digital content publishers set artificially high prices to stop themselves going out of business. It will change, but it'll take a while.