Anime and manga are haunted by iTunes. At the technology section of ICv2's Conference on Anime and Manga held December 6 in New York City, content providers spoke of the dream of finding a distribution system that outcompetes illegal activity. The way iTunes slowed piracy in the music business was on everyone's minds. Milton Griepp of ICv2 moderated a panel featuring Jeremy Ross, director of new product development for Tokyopop; John Nee, v-p of business development for DC Comics; Peter Heumiller, v-p of content development for Comcast; and Daniel Marks, senior v-p of strategy and business development for Viz Media.
Marks started with a discussion of Viz's Toonami Jetstream, a broadband streaming channel for the Cartoon Network. Earlier this year, Viz began digital downloads for Windows systems, starting with the anime Death Note, then Bleach, and now Naruto. Viz's main digital focus is anime; it’s still investigating the market for digital manga. Comcast reports that it has anime available on its video-on-demand platform, with about 20 hours of free, advertiser-supported content.
Nee said that in the U.S., DC is "still exploring the digital distribution options for traditional print. We're having a lot of meetings," he added. DC has online distribution in place in Japan in the form of Flex Comics, where DC bypasses comic books and serializes on Web sites, cellphones and other mobile platforms. The plan is to eventually make money off the traditional, bound form. "It's really using the Web to grab as many eyeballs as possible," said Nee.
Tokyopop wants to "try a bunch of different things," said Ross. "The jury is still out on what will work. We want to see what people can be trained to like." He thinks the answer to what will work will be obvious in a few years, "but right now, it's rather arcane." Tokyopop started pushing OEL online a few years ago as part of its strategy. Ross believes this online push helped validate OEL as an artform. (Now Tokyopop is using OEL to teach English in Japan.) The company has also created iManga, a subscription-based, cellphone manga that costs $4.99 a month and now is two years old. Ross reports that iManga has, on average, about 50,000 subscribers. Heumiller also believes digital will help feed the sales of the physical, and praised iManga.
After the panel, Ross admitted that the 'tween shojo crowd, who are too young to drive and spend a great deal of time texting their friends, are Tokyopop's ideal iManga audience. In Japan, fewer people own personal computers and laptops; cellphones are far better developed for the kind of instant communication U.S. teens want. But unlike in Korea and Japan, the cellphones girls carry in the U.S. aren't yet sophisticated enough for the digital delivery of manga.
Nee believed that digital won't eat into the sale of the physical object, the way it has in the music industry, and agrees that it will help the sale of physical goods. "The book is a perfect device. It boots instantly. It doesn't need maintenance. You can view it from any angle."
Heumiller said the anime fan is a "perfect audience" for video-on-demand. "We're seeing a very consistent viewership staying with our product," he said. Marks placed faith in ad-sponsored sites and in the iTunes model for video content, though he believed the model is far from perfect, citing how NBC balked at iTunes, saying new shows should be more expensive. Ross added that, with truly well-targeted ads, you're actually providing a service to the viewer, not a hindrance.
When Griepp asked how forms of legal digital delivery can deal with piracy, Ross replied, "Right now, they can't." The problem rests in how animation is made in Japan, where the final anime scripts are delivered only hours before the show is aired. So you can't get materials in the U.S. beforehand to beat the clock on fans, who will download and post anime, complete with subtitles, within a day. Manga has the same problem with scanlations. Then Ross brought up iTunes. "Piracy isn't going to go away. For every pirate you put out of business, five will pop up. What we need to do is come up with ways that make people want to get it from us. Look at what iTunes has done." Content providers can't capitulate, but they can't spend too much time trying to get sites to take things down, which Ross compared to playing whack-a-mole.
Nee blamed illegal anime downloads for the downswing in DVD sales, and Marks noted that "cease and desist letters work for about five minutes." Ross believed a victory against pirates might not be a good thing. "There's a trend among pirates sites to say, 'we're not going to go away, and we help build your market. Work with us.' " (Ross said this is particularly true in manga.) No one's figured out a way to do that yet because "it's like working with the enemy," but Ross believed there will be creative and possibly collaborative solutions down the road. One area in which Ross has hope is creative commons licenses, granting fans limited rights to use material for their own purposes, even to mash it up.
