The Tower of Druaga - The Aegis of URUK (Preview)
UR DOING IT … well, sort of right actually.
My plan is not really to talk about the premiere episode of one of April’s big new shows with a mouthful title, The Tower of Druaga - The Aegis of Uruk, from Gonzo. The show was entertaining — fast-paced, surprisingly funny, and well animated, especially for the notoriously inconsistent studio.
What interests me most about it is that Gonzo and Bost TV have partnered up to offer the series (along with another series called Blassreiter) in supposedly high quality, translated and subbed, as it comes out.
Hold on there
No one promised you a rose garden. The first episode is being offered for free, it’s even on YouTube, but thereafter Bost TV will be charging money for it. Druaga is a half-season show, and from the looks of it that will run you $20 USD. That means a full-season show like Blassreiter will be… $40. Sounds crazy, right? If you planned on watching, say, 5 anime shows this season (I think I watched 6 this past one), 200 bones would be a lot of cash to shell out for television, wouldn’t it?
That said, I can see the reasoning: Bandai Visual wants us honky suckers to pony up that much just to watch 13 episodes of True Tears on DVD 2 months after the fact, so there has to be someone out there thinking what Gonzo’s thinking: it’s a lot less bread, so why not?
Change the model
Remember how home taping was killing the music industry? Maybe you don’t, but this shit has always been happening, in spite of how much our RIAA wants you to believe it started with Napster. Hollywood thought the television would destroy movies forever, then VCRs, then downloads. Many more of these mini-media-revolutions are going on right now, and the Americans are finally starting to get it right. Have you seen Hulu? It’s not bad at all. You can only watch the most current shows, but it’s decent and the turnaround is very quick. It’s also controlled by the networks, so it’s not a cluttered-up mess like YouTube and everything there is official and of reasonably consistent quality. More importantly? It’s ad-supported.
People want to watch their TV for free. And maybe it’s unfortunate, but people on the internet want pretty much everything to be free. You don’t necessarily have to be better than the fansubbers, offering mkv’s at 720p resolutions (although why not? bittorrent is a legitimate distribution method that could be used to keep bandwidth costs down and leave middlemen like Bost out of the picture) — you just have to be as fast, reliable, and easy as them. Frankly, I’ll watch in a browser window on my lunch break. But I won’t pay cash money to watch in a browser window on my lunch break. I’ll look at ads in order to do it. I’ll even watch pre-rolls.
But seriously. This is the internet, and the same business models and pricing schemes that DVD companies use do not translate. Nice first step, but don’t stop just because you came up with something.
- otou-san out!
