You can watch all episodes of many series' on Crunchyroll and it's only $7/mo.

DVD subs can't be anti-aliased, at least not completely.

DVD subs can't do karaoke effects, unless they're hardsubbed.

What exactly is "common sense placement"? Fansubs don't use common sense placement either, as their subs often hug the borders of the image and drag viewers' eyes away from the main action.

Most fansub karaoke coloring only serves to make the subtitles as background-blending and unreadable as possible -- this makes them *more* distracting, since you have to strain your eyes to parse them out against the art work.

And ultimately, we're supposed to be entertained by the content of the songs and dialogues themselves, not by the colors, fonts, and effects on the subtitles.

Although from a writing/enjoyability perspective, the Bandai Haruhi subs are truly worse than the a.f.k. fansubs.

How quick they are to forget. I've been involved in the fan subbing culture for many years ( almost 20 years) due to the fact that here in the UK Anime titles were unavailable. That's because everybody here at the time thought they were just cartoons for kids, until people like myself set out to "educate" people about this form of art. In the past Hollywood had gotten hold of a few of these titles and in their travesty of translation completely destroyed the whole meaning of the piece. Early on before the widespread availability of Anime the US & UK were able to do this as many of japan's media was never exported (I think they let them get away with it cause they were just grateful of the extra sales) whereas some of us were able to, at enormous expense get hold of the originals either from Japan herself or via bulletin boards, the WWW had only just been implemented back then, you were lucky to get a picture on a web site let alone video. We setup Newsgroups and got hold of translators etc... etc.. well you know how it works without me going into detail. The gist of it being without the fan-subbing Anime would still be widely misunderstood and unavailable.

Where would their sales be without us. Also I might add that we were encouraged in the past to do this and were only asked to stop when they released the video themselves so we would not impinge on the said sales. I rather think it's to do with the modern CODECs we use now, as in the past it took a day to download a small video file about the size of a large postage stamp and cost a fortune in telephone charges (no broadband back then) but now with the CODECs we have now most are in broadcast quality and can be downloaded in a few minutes.

I do understand the position of the Anime companies wanting to maximize their profits in a recession, but we are all going through this as well, so if we can't keep the interest level peaked with the new releases the said companies will lose sales simply because its still not mainstream entertainment. OK once in a while a Studio Ghibli film will peak interest from the movie sites but the majority of the Anime series will gain no mainstream publicity at all. It's still quite difficult to go out and rent an Anime series at all. Most Anime is still purchased via the internet.

Maybe the producers misunderstand what we are trying to do. We have at great expense and with an enormous amount of time been able to show off these beautiful works to the rest of the world and have at the same time educated hollywood, though limited success, in treating these works seriously and not as kids toons. We have also added to the producers of these works a much greater market, increased profits, better recognition and a better understanding of this outstanding form of art work, and what did we charge? NOTHING. All we wanted to do was to be able to watch these titles ourselves.

Although much has been achieved I still can't go out into the high street and buy the latest series released. Please allow us to continue our work... We are tying to help you.

Kind regards

Just like the late 90s/early 2000s mp3 boom. People will find a way to get around it somehow.

The fans hold the most power, of all.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a147/Xyanide/OHGODSUBS3.jpg
http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a147/Xyanide/OHGODSUBS3.jpg

Not to worry though, Funimation does seem to do a decent job on the karaoke subs. However they are all still looking pretty bland while fansubs use visually more appealing with their animated fonts and colours.
In the mortifying case of bandai USA they don't even use anti-aliasing/de-interlacing, common-sense-placement-filtering and quality check on their subs.

Are these companies technologically impaired?

And so far, everything is pretty much "hand-me-downs" with no nod towards the non-Japanese anime fandom outside the otaku fanbase. Sure we have works like Batman, Afro Samurai, and Ghost N Da Shell. But that's about it.

I can understand "the shows must be left unedited." Lest a company becomes hated like 4Kids. But the Japanese anime industry still has this stigma against "being different" and catering to people who hadn't been spoken for. Everyone's been stepping all over GONZO despite striking gold with Strike Witches.

I can still sense a lot of xenophobia, "anti-achiever disdain," and flat-out refusal to "get from behind the walls." And it's been shown via Bandai Visual USA and their failed attempt to Japanize outer-Asia animu distribution. ($50 for single-audio-language 2-episode DVDs and Blu-Rays. Fabulous!)

So as long as the anime industry's xenophobia exists; fansubs are not going away anytime soon.

Get in touch with fansubbing groups and get them under contract. Offer them a very small slice of the profit pie if they place an advertisement in the middle of the video. Then stream it for free at a decent resolution. Offer it for a buck if they want high resolution. Heck, I'd pay that.

The only complicated part is how to handle distribution and advertising using Bit Torrent. Maybe the answer there is to only offer videos in a particular format like RealPlayer (yes I hate real player too but thats a format that can supporting advertising)

Right now, the Fan subbing community pretty much handles all advertising for new shows for free. So there goes your savings from a marketing prospective. Using bit torrent and streaming drastically cuts your distribution costs. Relying on Fan Subbing instead of licensing through US or other international distributors GREATLY increases your margins. All you need to do is sell advertising in multiple countries. Heck, they could also market figures and other toys more thoroughly.

There are so many ways to make coin off the fan subbing community it is stupidly simple. The problem is that these Japanese execs have their blinders on and can't see outside their narrow view. There is a ton of money sitting on the table but they are focused on the pennies on the floor...