Obligatory Reply to tl;dr

OK. I’ll start by pasting this, so I automatically get a free link here:

http://www.ggkthx.org/2010/01/10/jaka-bugs-sam-for-2hrs-and-i-paste-the-chatlog/

Now that’s out of the way, I’ll just pick the relevant parts.

Sam: Good question. Pardon the wordy answer… I wasn’t just a normal physics phd. I got my phd in string theory. You know, the super ultra complicated theory of everything that people are so excited about.

Thanks. Now I’m gonna waste 2 hours clicking around Wikipedia.

Jaka: We also have noticed from the question about those ripping groups, you sound like you have a grudge against them. Is there really that much hate for groups such as Commie/HorribleSubs/etc?
Sam: Uh, well their stated purpose is to “piss off Crunchyroll”. I can’t jab back? Trust me, CR knows about them and if they ever get bought out by a company with a legal department, the hammer will fall.

Just to clear shit up. Commie’s stated purpose isn’t to “piss off Crunchyroll” (I always thought it was capitalised “CrunchyRoll”, but meh). In fact, I don’t even know what our purpose is. I think like, we encode shit, and since it doesn’t take much more effort, we’d might as well put subs on it. And also, real life is getting pretty busy, so we’re probably going to be doing less and less stuff, and we’ll probably end up becoming one of those obscure DVD/BD encoding groups.

Sam: Well, they’ve licensed a crap load of Korean and Chinese drama and almost no Japanese drama.
Jaka: Oh, I thought it was mainly Japanese. Guess I thought wrong.
Sam: The dramas are anywhere from 10-1 years old. They have a close relationship with MBC (Korea) and a Chinese TV station.

No simulcasts?

Jaka: I forgot if this were mentioned on your interview – what’s CR business model like… as in, they split the revenues with the mother companies, right?
Sam: CR’s business model is a hybrid subscription/ad-based revenue share. Let’s take the subscriber part first. All that money goes into a pot. The total number of minutes spent watching each show by subscribers is calculated. So “Naruto 312 has a total of 123456 subscriber minutes in Q2″ or whatever and the pot of money is split up to the various different Japanese companies in proportion. Then CR takes it’s cut (which varies with each contract, obviously) and the Japanese get the rest. The ad-based model is more usual: Total ad revenue is reported to CR by the ad-serving company for each video… It’s added up and split up based on the ad-based revenue split (which is often different than the subscriber one).
Jaka: I see.
Sam: The good news with this is that people who subscribe and like, JUST watch Naruto can be happy knowing that all their money ends up going to the people that make Naruto.

That was a bit tl;dr. But basically what I see is that instead of just ripping the subs (which means the video plays for about 2 seconds) (actually, it’s more conveinient to just get the subs from [CrunchyRip] (Note: I have no affiliation with them)), I should now be letting the video run to completion so that more $$$ or ¥¥¥ get to the companies that make the anime that I actually like (not Naruto). So the tl;dr of what I said is: I leave The Book of Bantorra playing in Firefox, but for the rest of the crap I just shut it off right after I’ve got the subs. Thanks for that information, Quarkboy. (Sorry, I don’t like Letter Bee, or Cobra).

Sam: CR actually did a LOT of damage control after that. All the clients at CR got really jittery worried that the same thing would happen to them. You see, to Japan “the internet” is this amorphous scary thing. They don’t really know the difference between Funi or CR or youtube.

Says the country with 1 Gbps fibre-to-the-home.

Sam: So the head of CR in Japan actually went around giving a power point presentation about CR’s super ultra security systems to calm nerves, which included a pretty careful breakdown of what happened to Funi and why it wouldn’t happen with CR. It was seen as a bit “out of line” though and it didn’t really help CR much. Not very Japanese to jump on other company’s giant errors.

Just like me jumping on Kristen or Spielgel’s encoding right? Anyway, ETA till someone breaks CR’s super mega ultra security. Prob. their administrators have a dictionary password or something. idk

Sam: I think most of them are aware of the ripping sites. Their existence is a good argument to press for a fully ad-based model. Free from day one for everyone + worldwide rights. You blame (rightly so) the existence of the sites on region locking and the subscriber lock out window. So basically you say “hey, see those? You want to get rid of them? Get us global rights and day 1 free streaming”.
Jaka: So the 7 day members only thing is a Japanese requirement?
Sam: Well, yeah basically, but to be honest it was the right move. The ad revenue is not enough yet. Without the subscription based model the site would’ve gone bankrupt a while ago.
Jaka: I would imagine such a site would take up a large amount of bandwith and therefore money.
Sam: The money is in the licensing costs, not the bandwith.
Jaka: Oh.
Sam: And translation costs, too. And the biggest one for CR is just overhead from salaries and office rental. Having a Japanese branch is expensive. Bandwith is dirt cheap lately.

Jaka showing his lack of :clue: on bandwidth. Why would CR, a “silicon valley startup”, waste money on a Japanese office when they could just do it all onli… Oh wait: >”amorphous scary thing”

And koda said something about that actually meaning HS (and prob. Commie to a lesser extent, but we’re more relevant to something later) are somehow helping CR.

[10/01 14:41:35] <@freya> ol
[10/01 14:41:44] <@freya> actually
[10/01 14:41:50] <@freya> idk how much im supposed to say but like
[10/01 14:41:52] <@freya> re-rip groups like you
[10/01 14:41:53] <@freya> and HS
[10/01 14:41:59] <@freya> help crunchy
[10/01 14:43:40] <@freya> but it would please japan if they stopped
[10/01 14:43:58] <@freya> uhh you know how people’s like big complaint about crunchy is that it’s not in my region?
[10/01 14:44:45] <@freya> if rip groups continue to exist, crunchy can use you as an example
[10/01 14:44:48] <@freya> for reasons to go ad based
[10/01 14:44:53] <@RHExcelion> i figured that they would know how to use a PROXY though
[10/01 14:45:04] <~cryptw> ic ic
[10/01 14:45:18] <~cryptw> wait, what does “ad based” mean?
[10/01 14:45:30] <@freya> worldwide rights & ad based model
[10/01 14:45:32] <~cryptw> so no memberships?
[10/01 14:45:39] <@freya> like when you watch a stream and you get cockblocked by an ad
[10/01 14:45:43] <@freya> yeah no membership
[10/01 14:45:43] <~cryptw> oh, that
[10/01 14:45:46] <@freya> no 1 week thing
[10/01 14:45:50] <@freya> that’s their ideal thing

Hi Japan! Everything seems to end up getting blamed on you, so like just give CR what they want so we can stop existing. Off Topic: koda is in #commie now for some reason, so the :activity: in there is now much more interesting than RHE and I blogging about encoding, so drop by or something.

Jaka: What are your insights of that Bandai Kurokami thing?
Sam: I know a lot about that. What specifically?
Jaka: Please do tell us about it. How did it come about? How did it end up on CR? Whose dumb idea was it to air it on iaTV only? Was it like, Bandai picked a sacrifical goat show to experiment with or something?
Sam: Bandai Ent. wanted to be helpful and set up the Kurokami streams which was seen mainly as advertising for the upcoming disc releases, except of course Bandai in Japan delayed and delayed. Then there were politics. The failure in Japan to sell hardly anything and horrible reception caused Bandai to stall. Then the horrible decision to go dub only on the blu-ray (reverse importation fears that make no sense).
Jaka: Lol.
Sam: Kurokami was an experiment, sure, but it was a horribly executed one. I can only hope that the people in charge are fired, but it’s Bandai so I doubt it.

I love dubs.

Jaka: I see. A half serious question: Doesn’t it reflect badly on loljapan when an “amateur” can encode from a .ts and the result is better than the “official” goods they get given and publish on the site?
Sam: They don’t know, and when I explained it to them and showed it to them… Yes, they were very upset. This happened at two different occasions. It visibly upset the person one time.
Jaka: Go ahead.
Sam: No, that’s all I’ll say.
Jaka: Oh, nvm then.
Sam: But generally encoding is something that almost everyone is ignorant of here, except the editing studios which act like black boxes. CR has done a lot of good in educating people on that, and so have I.
Jaka: I think one of the biggest complaints about being anti-streaming is that the video is terrible. Funimation hardsubbing subs in particular comes to mind. Is Japan/Funi going to make any effort to improve?
Sam: Only if it is shown to improve the profits. I just spent a while explaining the difference between hardsubbing and soft subbing to Bandai Channel. There’s a lot of education to be done. I wasn’t really aware of too many people complaining about Funi’s hard subbing… isn’t the video stream itself so low quality that it hardly makes a difference? Actually I’m region blocked so I haven’t seen it lately, heh.

Yes, Jaka is correct. We’re amateur encoders. Go download Chihiro’s fabulous professional(tm) encoding instead. I’m having a bit of trouble deciphering Quarkboy’s :grammar: I can’t tell if they’re upset that their official shit looks shitter than our encodes, or they’re upset that we’re doing these encodes in the first place. That aside, I watched Book of Bantorra 14 on CrunchyRoll due to @chibi on PD having problems capping that episode from ANIMAX. (Well technically I downloaded HS, since Bantorra isn’t available to Australia, but I did get my Amerikan friend to log onto my CR Anime Account and let Bantorra play right through so that I’m supporting teh animu creators). The Crunchy video quality has improved quite considerably since I last checked it (Natsu no Arashi! S1) to a point where it’s better than Chihiro encodes and most Share raws (but still not as good as most fansub encodes from .ts), and to non-encoders it should be an acceptable quality level. This means that I’ll probably stop bothering with this ripping business after this season and just watch stuff on CR (and unlike those 5 year old whiners on the CR forums, I know how to use a proxy).

Right, I think that covers everything.

EDIT: I forgot. You should watch stuff (or at least let it play through) on CrunchyRoll, so that Japan gets to find out the sort of anime you like (if it’s Tegami Bachi, COBRA or Chu-Bra, then please give it a miss), and you can “support” them. To be honest, them paying me 5c for 3 months of Anime Membership is a pretty good deal, and even their regular pricing is quite good. (Where else can you instantly access 9001 episodes of :stuff: for $7. (Protip: Torrents aren’t instant. Especially old stuff)).