Whoa, that really sucks. Looks like someone’s PR department needs retraining, and your action seems like the right move. Word should spread quickly, too, if other people have had the same experiences.

That really sucks.. sorry to hear that.
animemiz´s last blog ..Ohitorisama – Episode 1 to 2

Just sounds like a lot of whining to me.

From what I understand, Funimation doesn’t have the licensing rights to distribute in the UK, if that’s the case, then that would definitely explain why UK residents are being blocked from their site.

Of course, I could be wrong about this in regards to the UK, but this is definitely the case here in Australia.
Snark´s last blog ..Air Master – Review

You are wrong Snark

While its true a lot of their older stuff isnt licensed for the UK (not that it dosent stop them send C&D notices to british fansubbers), almost all of their new releases (from a year or so ago) are licensed for the UK as well as the US.

unfortunately, what snark says is true. The only region that Funi will be most concerned with is the R1 Region(US). They won’t be concerned with streaming for other Regions…But they would be very concerned with fansubs of their series. To their standpoint, Even though the fansubs are generally for the UK fans, What doesn’t stop the US fans from dling the same eps?

Tiamat, you should do a UK industry post. That would be very informative(So we can see how the R2UK region is different from the US.
jopchan121´s last blog ..The return of Joppy’s Collection: Blu Ray Jitters

I’m certainly becoming less and less inclined to support them. They seem to be trying to replace ADV as the industry bullies.

While FUNimation’s overall attitude towards the UK market doesn’t surprise me from a business perspective (like it or not, we are a tiny market for anime in relative terms), I am surprised at just how brazen they are when it comes to shrugging off UK fans publicly – Certainly, my own enquiries about what’s going on with the video portal have had similarly rude responses.

I know licensing and geographic restrictions upon said licenses can be a nightmare, but as you say there’s absolutely no conceivable way that the amount of time it’s taken to reopen their portal to the UK can be put down to this any more, otherwise we would have at least seen them open up the portal and start unblocking some content to the UK. This hasn’t happened (and when access was opened up for a couple of days for whatever reason everything worked as it should with regard to content which was open and blocked to UK users), so it seems pretty clear to me that there’s a more fundamental issue at stake.

What I’d really like to know is just what that issue is. Re-opening UK access would be trivial enough, so what’s *really* stopping them? Enquiring minds want to know, but I doubt we’ll ever find out.

Funimation as a firm is approaching the entire situation incorrectly, from a business prospective and from an ethics prospective. Allow me to elaborate.
The whole point of e-commerce is the ability to appeal to niche markets and target niche audiences without having to worry about limiting geographical factors. Traditional music and video stores such as Best Buy or Blockbuster can’t afford to carry less popular titles because the shelf space is limited and each individual store is immobile and chained to the community it serves. Therefore, an audience thinly spread across a wide geographic region (like anime in the West) might as well be no audience at all. If each town in the UK had 3 anime fans, there are a lot of anime fans in the UK, but if only one in twenty towns had a video store, they are only going to sell three DVDs from each, which is not worth their time to carry. The entire advantage to distributing licensed media online like Funimation, NetFlix, or Amazon is how it overcomes this geographical barrier. Funimation is making a mistake in not taking advantage of the British market. This phenomenon is called the Long Tail, which you can read more about here if you want a more detailed explanation of the concept: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail_pr.html

Secondly, I would like to address their habits of C&Ding everything. Funimation does as it pleases because the whole licensing system essentially gives them a monopoly over distribution of a specific series. Wanna watch Phantom? Sure, but we can make it as crappy as we want because you have no alternative. Or we can just deny this service to you and there is no other way to enjoy this media. Fansubs are illegal, remember? In this Web 2.0 world, copyright definitely needs to be overlooked. Fansubs of a licensed show denies a DVD sale, yes, but some of the projects Funi shot down are not even available on market. Like in your case, you can’t even stream anime on the site from the UK, so that means you just can’t watch the show at all? That’s bullshit.
Fansubs/scans are quick, efficient, and generally held to a good quality because there is competition in the fansubbing community. Don’t like aquastar? Watch gg. If there is one thing these corporations can learn, it’s that concept. Obviously I don’t want to get involved in a fansubbing ethics debate here, but you have to remember that Funimation is a business, and they don’t see the UK as profitable. They have hedged public backlash against increased profits, and in cases like this, unfortunately, loyal consumers like you and I suffer.

I heard you like Funimation.

@Jopchan I’ve actually thought about doing something like that for a while, but it would be very hard to do since in truth there is no industry in the UK.

Out of all the publishers, in both manga and anime, only one, Yen Press, actively promte and distribute in the UK. Every other publisher either sub licenses through the likes of MVM or a slew of other smaller distributors. Almost all of the anime we get in the UK is imported, with only a small handful officially released here.

As i said in my initial post, we are a small market, but the anime and manga community in the UK has one advantage over the american side. We’re more stable, and we’re more hungry.

At a con a year or so ago we did a poll on the goers, 78% of them admited they’d bought anime off of the likes of Ebay which hosts several of the largest importers of anime and manga. The anime usually comes from Malaysia, and is legal. The only difference is that they come in entire season packs and in cheap and crappy cases, but they are legal.

The reason they buy it, 96% of them stated it was because they didn’t want to wait 2-3 years for it to be released over here officially.

Granted things have gotten better, with some anime being released only a few months after it’s US release, but a lot of them still take anywhere upto 8 years to officially get to the UK market. Chobits was the longest i believe, with just over a seven year wait for it to be official released in the UK, despite them holding the UK rights from the outset.

For me, i see this as being a simple problem. The publishers have never made any effort to actually discover the UK market. They don’t take the time to discover just how big the market is here, or what the fans here want. They don’t feel the need to since they know that fans would import from the US, so they still got their sales. So why should they make an effort to support the UK market?

@Hanners Yea i agree, i doubt we’ll ever know the full reasons for whats taking so long, and Funi’s attitude at recent cons pretty much just proves their attitude towards us. At one event the Rep turned up 10mins after his time slot and said he got lost, the hotel he was staying in was across the road hehe

Again, it’s an investment to translate and distro on a massive scale like a country. Even if e-commerce technologies can make the market more appealing to a firm (otherwise there would be no anime market in the west at all except like, California) they just don’t see the market as profitable.

Thats the point Kevo, they dont see the market because they dont look. In the past decade oly one company has ever actually activly tried to market to the UK, Yen Press.

Viz, TP, Del Rey and the others all do the same thing, they wait till a series is out in the states and almost over, then release in the UK and cite lack of sales for not carrying on. They don’t seem to want to accept that pretty much every series they have released in the UK has already been bought through imports.

Until they follow Yen Press’ lead and actually examine the market, they can not claim there’s no market. It’s basically them looking wityh closed eyes and saying theres nothing there. They need to open their eyes

“Funi don’t consider UK fans as a priority concern since the market here is so small”

And hence business potentials are lost.
They should be smarter than that.
blur´s last blog ..Insert own caption about Otaku Elimination here.

Apologies if this ends up posted more than once, but it never appeared last time, so I’m going to try again
To start with Del Rey’s Tanoshimi branch were releasing most of their titles (well, their starting lineup; Air Gear, Negima, Tsubasa, xxxHolic… possibly school rumble?) at around the same time as their US release dates, but they gave up some time last year (well, officially this year? I can’t recall. Last releases were 2008, and they were starting to lag behind on some volumes by then).
I assume that means it didn’t work out for them, which is a shame

Viz half arsed it, and as I could go on about that for far too long, thats all I’ll say on that matter.

Tokyopop. Meh, I don’t know. They did the recons in the UK, they did try to promote, but the titles they chose to release and promote seemed like damn odd choices, and most of them stopped part way through or just vanished entirely. I can’t actually find any UK specific info on their UK site anymore either, but it is entirely possible that its there and I just can’t find it – I do despise that website.
Also, now Diamond has obtained “exclusive” UK distribution rights for them and Pan Macmillan will cease UK distribution in 2010, I have no idea what that means for “Tokyopop UK” as it is now.

I like that Yen Press are actively keeping the UK market in the loop, and I sincerely hope it works out for them, because I like their manga and I like them.
(Even if I hate their handling of Yen Plus here… and that comment you got in your interview only made me it worse. “the UK market reception for manga in a magazine format has been lukewarm.” Of COURSE it was sodding lukewarm. They used a magazine distributor with approximately no actual distribution channels as most newsagents and convenience stores use a different one and couldn’t order it, and the distributor had horrific online subscription pricing. It got a lukewarm response because people who wanted it and people who might have picked it up couldn’t)

Moving on to the anime front… in large part I have to admit that I really don’t know.
I stopped paying any large degree of attention to the UK anime industry a long time ago, because the wait time was frustrating, and I started buying US imports. Multi-region dvd players really are quite awesome.
With regards to being blocked out of websites though… I’m used to it. Funi aren’t the only publisher to have done so, and even if they fixed it I probably wouldn’t go there. I’m just not a fan of streaming.

For all things have been rubbish before though, a lot of things now don’t seem as bad, at least from my limited view of stuff I have seen or recall seeing

Manga Entertainment seem releasing Bleach on a reasonable schedule. They’re just (as far as I’m aware?) not bothering with the ’singles’ that the US gets, which is probably a sound business decision (well, from my pov. I always hated buying singles). From what I can tell, the release dates for their full season releases pretty much correspond with the US ones.

I also don’t think Beez have been doing too badly… at least on quality. Yes, there is time lag, but they do at least try to keep their production values up for the most part. There have been ’special editon’ releases for a number of the series that also got US special edition releases (Haruhi, TTGL, Gundam 00) and for some of their box sets (erm… Gundam SEED is the only one that comes to mind ><)
Oddly, Geass seemed to skip that, which was weird when the US releases had some pretty awesome bonus content.
To their credit, there doesn't even seem to be that much of a delay with their Gundam 00 release, and they have a separate special edition too. Alas, I have not been supporting them. I'm a manga person, and unfortunately I would much rather have the bundled-in manga from the US version than the 12 cm action figure, a badge, a keyring and an iron-on from the UK one.

Apart from that its all a haze. If I see something I like I may well buy it, but I can't say I really pay attention to the publishers and what they're up to.
The last UK releases I bought were The Cat Returns (from Optimum I think? Whoever releases all the ghibli stuff anyway) and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and some reduced Bleach box sets (Manga Ent).
Before that it was probably the repackaged Last Exile discs from ADV.

On a random UK release date note though, I did recently stumble across a release that made me laugh:
Last month, MVM started releasing the X anime in the UK. I picked up the first 3 US dvds years ago (some time in Feb or March 2003) when I was last in the US myself, but I never managed (or got around) to getting the rest of them.
So, assuming the episode count per volume is the same when volume 4 is released in 2010 I'll finally be able to start finishing the series.
Seven years later.
How good it is to have anime released so promptly

Del Rey’s mistake was not trying hard enough. Tanoshimi had the potential to be Yen Press, but they never really followed through. The Tanoshimi website was an absolute nightmare, they may have been releasing fairly quickly, but trying to find the title you were after was a headache. I remember trying to find an Air Gear volume and all it kept giving me was Othelo and something else heheh.

Also, the UK releases were a lot more expensive than the US ones. Example, a US copy of XXXHolic ordered through Waterstones was 5.99. The Tanoshimi release, again ordered through Waterstones, was 7.99. It dosent take a mathmatician to work out which most people would prefer.

I sooooo hear you on the Viz crap. They do it ever few years, start to release a series thats been over for ages in the UK then cite lack of sales for stoping. Recently it was Flame of Recca and Buso Renkin.

Tokyopop UK is dead, it died last year when they almost went under. I believe there’s like 4 members f staff left in the UK office and they’re supposedly only part timers working in the CON season. The RECON events the did with Waterstones would have been awesome, if they hadn’t spent almost the entire time bitching about how Waterstones importing a series was wrong. The guy who came to my local one really went at the mangaer for having the 6 volumes Magical X Miracle series in stock, since only volume one had officially been released in the UK.

Sadly your right about Yen Plus. I tried to tell this to Kurt when they started, COMAG are technically the biggest distributor in the UK, but most newsagents and all chain stores (such as the COOP and WHSmith) son’t use them, they use Dawson News. Also it didnt help that COMAG were only releasing Yen Plus to shops in Birmingham, London and Manchester, which cut availability even further.

Then for some reason i still havent been able to figure out, they moved to Diamond as the sole UK distributor. So that meant that UK fans couldn’t subscribe at all anymore, and the price doubled from 3.99 an issue to 8.99 an issue. Though it has just recently gone down to a more reasonable 6.99 an issue. Still no sign of subscriptions for us though.