Manga Entertainment · @MangaUK
22nd Jan 2011 from Twitlonger
@metalcaveman Thanks for your tweet. More than happy to answer your questions. First off, here's the #Funimation blog addressing the whole Fractale fansub palaver http://blog.funimation.com/. This blog was posted by Lance Heiskell, Marketing Director for Funimation. I know Lance personally and he is a fantastic guy who I enjoy working with very much, but more importantly he is a fan as much as anyone on this forum. I only just read the blog and I have to say that I agree with what he has said. Saying that, I am still bewildered by the Fractale Commitee's decision to penalise Funimation and the American fan community for the behaviour of a few idiots.
OK, so onto your questions. First, you want to know what happens when you buy a Funi or Manga DVD release on Amazon or Rightstuff or in Walmart or Best Buy. Let's use Naruto Shippuden Box 1 UK edition as an example. Manga Entertainment has the exclusive UK distribution rights to this series. We license it from TV Tokyo who are part of the Naruto Shippuden committee along with Shueisha (the manga publisher and owner of "Shonen Jump" magazine), Studio Pierrot, the anime studio who create the series, the manga creator and a few other investors in the anime.
For every copy of Naruto Shippuden that we sell a royalty is paid back to TV Tokyo. The industry standard is 20% of the gross receipt. So, if we sell a DVD for $20, TV tokyo will get $4 back. that is quite a substantial amount of money considering the cost of producing, manufacturing, marketing and distributing the DVD that Manga ("The Distributor" aka "The Licensee") takes on.
So yes, when you buy an anime DVD it does support the industry. Firstly, the distributor (Manga) makes some money, which keeps us in business and means we can keep licensing and distributing anime back to you via DVD sales, TV broadcast, theatrical presentation ("The Movies"), digital download, digital rental, video on demand, subscription IPVOD (aka Internet Video on Demand),l free ad supported streaming (YouTube, Hulu) etc. Secondly and more importantly the Licensor of the anime back in Japan is getting paid, which means they will be able to then keep making more content.
As a side note, I should add that when you license something like a CD, movie or TV series you usually pay an advance, which is an advance payment on what you believe you will pay out to the licensor in royalties over the term of the license. So, in order to get Naruto Shippuden we may have agreed to pay TV Tokyo $200,000 in advance. We recoup this sum over the course of releasing Naruto on DVD and once we have recouped that sum we start paying overages (aka additional royalty payments). That means that on a long running show like Naruto, Bleach or One Piece a company like Manga could be paying out millions of dollars in royalties over the course of the license. This is a tidy sum and if you try guessing how much foreign license sales on most anime generates, it's potentially enough to cover the original production costs of several seasons.
The home video business is vital to the continuation of a healthy and vibrant anime industry. If you doubt that you need your head examining. (I don't mean you personally by the way!).