About Anime Aboveground

The purpose of this site is to educate anime fans and anime producers about the anime production process and promote the use of technology to build working business models that satisfy the needs of both anime consumers and anime producers.

Anime is a global phenomenon.

Hugely popular both inside and outside of its origin country of Japan, anime's reach has spread along with the growth of the internet. In fact, anime has a very symbiotic relationship with the internet. As fans create fansites of favorite characters and gather in communities to trade fan art and fan-fictions, the rise of the internet brings more visibility to such activites and further attracts more watchers.

"Fansubs" threaten the old model.

However, the ease and cheapness of communication across the internet, along with more powerful technology, are threatening the viability of old-fashioned anime distribution techniques. An underground community of fans create and share "fansubs" through peer-to-peer networks such as Bittorrent and video streaming sites such as YouTube. Anime watchers can find and downloads gigabytes of anime with just a few clicks. As technology improves, this process only gets simpler and faster.

Lessons can be learned from the music industry.

The music industry has been facing similar challenges such as Napster and has responded with lawsuits. This strategy has not been very successful as illegal music downloading continues to increase and has only served to vilify the commercial establishment. Instead, online sales of music in stores like ITunes are gaining momentum as the future model of media distribution. Ease of use and low prices are killer features in this new market.

There are new and better ways to sell and distribute anime.

The anime industry is at a critical point and faces the same situation as the music industry. With anime companies losing profits and some going out of business, the old model of DVD distribution has not been attractive to web-savvy anime fans. That is where this website comes in. There are some companies and some websites that are paying attention to their consumers, such as hosting video streams of anime hours after they air in Japan, fully subtitled. The purpose of this site is to educate anime fans and producers about the anime production process and promote the use of technology to build working business models that satisfy the needs of both anime consumers and anime producers. Many producers could use pointers and suggestions to sites like Crunchyroll, and anime fans stand to gain from knowing where the anime to love so much comes from, so as to continue to support their production so that there will be anime in years to come.

The future is ripe for new business models.

As technology improves into the future, hardware, software, and network infrastructure will only become cheaper, faster, and more powerful. High resolutions that we can only dream of can be streamed to every household and more storage space than anyone will need will be cheaper than a current day 1 GB flash drive. Illegal distribution of anime can become easier than reading your email. Or, anime companies will not have earned enough profits from their shows to keep up quality and creative production. In order to counteract such trends, anime companiers should strive for rapidity and transparency in their own distribution methods. Micropayments per view or download or flat, time-based fees will be successful if implemented in easy-to-use interfaces and profits are clearly sent to the anime creators. Speed will be of essence for any official offerings.

This site is free for all to view.

This website will be updated as more and more anime companies (hopefully) adopt business models that are attractive to both the anime watchers and the anime companies themselves. This website is not-for-profit and does not sell any products, so it relies on donations and, if the traffic is high enough, strategically and unobtrusively placed anime-related advertisements to cover maintenance costs. Of course, since this site is essentially advertising other websites, sponsorship from them would of course be appreciated.

This site was made as a project for the class CS73N, Business on the Information Highways, at Stanford University, Spring 2009.