Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog - Lessons Learned
Jul 26 2008 • Web
In an effort to procrastinate in an entirely different way, I didn’t watch any anime this week. Instead, one of the things I did was watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a web-promoted and web-released 3 episode musical about a pathetic villain and his nemesis. It’s kind of a live-action, singing (but not dancing) Venture Bros. created by Joss Whedon and family. It was entirely financed by Whedon and while the lack of budget shows, it doesn’t detract from the story at all. Sometimes, it’s nice when a show doesn’t need expensive special effects to sell itself to the audience.
After I had finished watching the series, it occurred to me that the anime industry might want to pay close attention to this. I know next to nothing about how it actually operates but as a consumer and a fan, I know that it operates ineffectively. While Whedon’s strategy cannot be applied directly, there are some merits to it that could benefit the anime industry.
The first is promotion, or basically the concept of the taste spoon. Whedon released his show via website and Hulu, allowing fans to view it in its entirety (within a certain time frame).1 This promotion cost only cost them bandwidth money and also let fans decide whether they wanted to buy the show or not, legitimately. In terms of anime, Netflix is the closest we can get in the US.
Another thing companies may want to pay attention to is the lack of turn around time between initial release and release for download and DVD. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was available from iTunes immediately after the show ended, with a DVD full of commentary expected before Christmas. It remains to see how well DVD sales will do and I suspect that only the most dedicated Whedon fans will purchase it but this strategy seems promising.
Now, I realize that for anime, things like licensing and translation force the industry to delay release. In order for the anime companies to even come close Whedon’s turn around time, my guess is that they would have to release a translation-only episode. However, if the comments on iTunes are any indication, a lot of people would not mind - it seems that one of the bigger laments is that the iTunes released Funimation shows are only dubs.
The final thing I’ve noticed the amount of loyalty fans have to this director. It’s almost frightening. I am not a huge fan of Whedon - this is the first show of his that I’ve watched in its entirety - but I admire how he’s cultivated this base. I’ve seen many anime fans profess loyalty to a series or a character but not as many for a studio or an artist. I admit I’m guilty of the same - but only in anime. I can readily say that I’m a huge fan of Marc Cherry, Paula Deen, Terry Pratchett, SquareEnix (nee Squaresoft), and Nintendo - but I have no idea who made Death Note.
At the time of writing, all Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog episodes are at the top of iTunes download. I’m not sure what the iTunes statistics are for the downloads but Whedon has insinuated that they are substantial and profitable. If the DVD release later this year is also successful, it may just be the first step towards providing compelling evidence that this business model can be successful.
- Perfect for a 3 episode show but perhaps a bit too free for 26+ episodes. [↩]
Related Posts
Comments
@Scott: And I’m looking forward to the change. However, the Dr. Horrible episodes were expensive - 1.99 for 15 minutes of show, compared to 1.99 for 20+ minutes with other shows. For me, I think it was that I got to see it completely that really sold me on it. $4 is not a lot in todays market - it just means I’ll have tofu vs. meat one night.
I figured the Japanese companies are holding up things. I suppose the airing on TV takes care of that preview problem but with FIOS becoming more prevalent, I don’t see why they’re slow to embrace streaming.
Leave a Reply
Recent Posts
- Japanese School Lunch: Week 22
- The Regression of My Anime Fandom
- Japanese School Lunch: Week 21
- Japanese School Lunch: Week 20
- Japanese School Lunch: Week 19
- The Introvert At Work
- Baskin Robbins: November Flavors
- Mos Eisley’s Got Nothing on a Japanese Preschool
- Final Review: Chi’s Sweet Home
- Purple for November, Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month
I agree that the industry needs to come out with a new kind of strategy, and perhaps the Dr. Horrible experiment should serve as a good example.
While the free promotion and quick turn-around probably did help it out a lot, I think the key to Dr. Horrible’s success was in its niche appeal (which you sorta mentioned with the Whedhon fanbase) and the price tag of the series. I’m also not much of a Whedon fan, but I ended up buying the series because of the buzz I was hearing about it on the internet. By hearing my fellow geeks praising the show, I wanted to watch it as well.
When I saw that the price tag was only $4 for the whole series, and I knew a purchase would mean that iTunes would sync it up to my iPhone automatically, I was sold. Clicked “buy” and that was that. It was pretty cute show, so it ended up being a good buy anyway. But even if I didn’t like the show, I don’t think I would regret paying only $4 for the download either. If you make the show cheap enough, you will sell a lot more copies to people who aren’t even sure if they’re fans yet.
This is completely applicable to anime shows as well. The whole key to anime is that it has niche appeal. Anime fans are really passionate about the medium, and they are willing to watch anything. The problem is the price tag. When you compare it to the cost of fansubs (free), DVDs are just way too expensive. So if they wish to continue to sell the expensive DVD to the hardcore fans of the series, they need to find a way to monetize those people who are not fans of the show yet. This could be either by ad revenue (like airing on Youtube or Hulu with banner ads) or by just making the product cheap enough to be worth a download, like my case with Dr. Horrible.
Quite frankly, the anime industry should have been the first ones to do some kind of online release plan like Dr. Horrible, and they should have done it years ago. The big problem is the stubbornness of the Japanese. It’s going to take many more successful Dr. Horribles out there before the Japanese are convinced to change their ways… or more than likely it’s going to take the shortage of American revenue to convince them to change… but either way, they’re going change sometime soon.