ADV Films pulls a total of 37 series this past Tuesday from its website with no explanation. Exactly what that means for ADV, its asian financial backers, and fans is currently up in the air. Viz drops a plethora of less well known anime licenses. Geneon removes itself from the U.S. Market entirely last year. AZN Network announces it will permanently shut down April 9th (owned by Comcast) after nearly a decade of life.
What does it all mean?
Though probably not a sign of the apocalypse, it's still vaguely disturbing. *Everyone* seems to be doing the Haruhi dance (The Melancholy of Suzimiya Haruhi ). When I say everyone, I mean everyone. Even prison inmates...
The winner of the Lancia Platinum Grand Prize is Byousoku 5 Centimeters (5 Centimeters per Second: A Chain of Short Stories about their Distance) by Makoto Shinkai “for the ability of combininig poetry, art and technical skills with animation and new technologies, a touching and deep-rooted story and a model direction. Every element of the movie, from the screenplay to the editing, is realized with great professionalism and inspiration”. A special mention has been assigned to Tekkonkinkreet by Michael Arias “for the interesting and original graphics; an involving story with a non-rhetorical message”.
Just when you thought you couldn't get enough lolicon, Biglobe puts up a streaming trailer of the 13th episode OVA of Moetan. The episode is scheduled for Japanese DVD release on March 25th.
As a promotional tool, Amazon's Unbox
digital video service is offering first episodes of a select series of anime titles for free. You can directly download first episodes of Afro Samurai, Astro Boy, Basilisk, Bleach, Death Note, Naruto, Samurai7, and Street Fighter II V. Of course you have to enter credit card information even for free episodes (we aren't exactly clear as to why ourselves). You also have to use Amazon's Unbox player or your totally out of luck too. As a further incentive they are offering quite significant discounts on full seasons of some titles, most being a little more than $30.
On the surface of it, this is a practical steal when compared to DVD box sets. However, keep in mind that Amazon's Unbox service is infected with copious amounts of Digital Rights Managment. The DRM basically means your watching this on an XP or Vista box, a Tivo (certain models of Tivo are directly supported), or nothing.
Though we don't expect Amazon itself to go anywhere anytime soon, there have been several debacle's recently where retailers got out of DRM laden downloads which left their customers out in the cold for license renewals. Buy in if you want to take the risk that someday your purchase will evaporate into nothingness. Back to the drawing board Amazon, I'll get my anime elsewhere.
