Thanks!

Plus, of course, it’s fun. :)

That situation applies to many fandoms these days, if what I see of anime fansubbing is anything to go by. It’s probably not the professional translators taking months, but rather companies being used to having months to arrange distribution elsewhere. That doesn’t work anymore, since there’s not really an “elsewhere” left in terms of media distribution. There’s no way to keep the US fans from talking to their non-US friends, and in a lot of fannish spaces, you help your friends out if they ask to see that thing everyone is raving about.

That lack of understanding is always the problem, isn’t it? Fannish audiences can be awesome marketing machines and bringers of large piles of cash. But they can have those advantages for companies only because they have certain community characteristics that also make them do things companies may not like, such as ripping stuff to show it to people in other countries who are also passionate about it.

Understanding and patience really wears thin when this situation just does not change, and every step forward comes wrapped in old, well-known mistakes like drm or other locks. It feels natural now to have all media on multiple platforms. Having everything available everywhere to everyone at the same time is what people think should work, and it’s just not possible to adjust people’s expectations to what you (as a company) want them to want. It’s impossible, and not very customer-friendly.

I get that it takes a lot of time to turn companies of that size around. But it’s been so long already, and if they’re still talking about digital content in this way even now, I completely understand why people give up on them.

Yes, there are some good reasons for those delays, reasons that many internet users often don’t seem to get.

Only because so much content is still locked to single platforms. I “get” perfectly well that we can’t see a show straight away because the network is selling it to overseas markets for considerable sums of money…but why is that so? Most shows are pre-sold in any case, so why can’t our local provider air it (stream it even) at the same time? This is especially frustrating in regions like mine where the analog transmitters have been shut down but because there’s so few people, no digital transmitter has been built and now there’s no free-to-air channels at all. There is, however, slow but fairly reliable internet. I have money. Nobody wants to take it from me.

HBO thinks digital content is a fad? Good lord. Unbelievable.

Thanks for the post.

It’s really no wonder that that Big Media will never understand how deep fannish passion can run.

This is pretty much the point that I made in Fighting the Fan Sub War – “companies” can’t really depend solely on laws to protect their assets any more. Successful asset protection has to be a full-time activity that includes interdiction and prosecution, but also education, and simply making “exploiting loopholes” unnecessary or more work than it’s worth. It took a while for U.S. anime companies to figure this out, but the couple that are still around finally *have* figured it out.

Welcome, and looking forward to what you write!

Does this relate in any way to Manovich’s concept of “tactical creativity” – and indeed, his focus on AMV’s *as* examples of tactical creativity?