Anyone else buy anime on iTunes last week?

February 23, 2007 in Anime, Shopping by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 3 comments

One of my 2007 predictions came true last week when Funimation launched its Funimation Channel on iTunes last Tuesday. That day I decided to plunk down 2 bucks to see what kind of quality the episodes are. Yes, I know they are dubbed only and I’m fine with that. I picked the first episode of Samurai 7 because I hadn’t seen it before. Now, I would have posted about this last week when it was actually news but my attempts to record a screencast came up not so good so I’ll have to settle for something more pictorial.

Apparently iTunes says that Samurai 7 is a “small town story”.

You can play downloaded episodes outside of iTunes by using the standalone Quicktime Player.

Here are the stats Quicktime produced for the episode. As you can see, it’s encoded at 179 KB/s at 23.98 fps with a 640×360 resolution and it played smoothly once I underwent a well-overdue RAM upgrade.

The series pages of Desert Punk, Samurai 7, and Speed Grapher, respectively. Buying the entire “season” of each will run you $38.99 and it will take a chunk of time to download the 6-7 GB of video. Doing that with Desert Punk would save you about 25% off buying each episode individually ($51.74) but the savings for Speed Grapher are negligible ($38.99 vs. $39.80).

One little thing I found interesting while browsing around is that the title for episode 5 of Speed Grapher has been partially censored based on already existing iTunes rules on displaying vulgarity. The original Japanese title was ???????? (daiyamondo fujin), which Shinsen-Subs translated as “Diamond Lady” when they were subbing it and ANN and AniDB list as “Madam Diamond”. Both of those seem to follow so I guess Funi used the context of the episode itself in coming up with the different title? Then again, episode 4 was originally “Booty Girl” and episode 6 “Goodbye, Madam Diamond” (see above picture for dub episode titles) so I think it’s part of a particular naming style within the studio.

I know that many of my readers live outside the US and thus it’s hard for them to buy from the US iTunes store but those of you that have the ability, did you try it out? I’ve read comments in the past that simply booed iTunes’ DRM so I would like more constructive criticism of the service if any. Also, I’m anticipating at least one “why did you buy a dubbed episode in the first place???” and my response would be that I wanted to initially support this experiment in the hopes of other companies doing the same thing in the future. Overall, buying an single episode might be a good way to get a sense of an anime legally (meaning no YouTube action) before having to purchase a full DVD but I think it would become unfeasible in my opinion to buy three or more episodes considering the copy-protection and file sizes.

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Hung on February 23, 2007 at 11:59 am

I just figured the previews were the same quality as the downloads, and saved $2! Nice writeup though.

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Sana Jisushi on February 23, 2007 at 12:27 pm

I know how you feel, I actually -watch- the dubbed episodes on a regular basis, and it feels like I’m the only one. Nothing against the original voice actors and script writers, but it seems unfair to treat the English ones the way they are. Unless, of course, it is Zoey Hanson and her snort laugh.

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CalAggie on February 23, 2007 at 4:30 pm

Hung: Yeah, they looked about the same. That was the first time I had actually PAID money to download something from the iTS (I mostly only grab the free weekly singles) and it will probably be a while before I do it again with something else. I still like buying physical DVDs and CDs because of their portability, tangibility, and resale value.

Sana Jisushi: If I haven’t seen something before and have a choice, I generally watch the original Japanese first and then the dub. But if it’s on cable, I’m fine with the English voicing. Plus if it’s in English, I can do something else and not have to watch the screen constantly during a long conversation scene. I had to look up Zoey Hanson because I didn’t watch Tokyo Mew Mew (or rather, Mew Mew Power) when it was on Saturday mornings.

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