ADV Offers Cheaper Downloads In Two Different Versions
Posted on November 20th, 2007 by calaggie in Anime, News, Shopping
Before this week, the downloadable episodes that ADV Films was selling through its website were priced at $4.99 each, much higher than anime on iTunes albeit ADV’s stuff was at a much higher bitrate as well. Now the company has announced that it has begun offering downloads of “over 500 episodes” from 32 series for $1.99. Sounds good, right? Well, maybe not if you look at what you’re getting for your two bucks.
Looking at the pricing scheme for the recently released title Venus Versus Virus, you can see that there are two versions of each episode: the $3.99 Premium edition (used to be the $4.99 version) and the $1.99 Standard edition. So what’s the big difference between the two that merits a supposed $2 separation in price?
Simple, the premium download bears a (near) DVD quality resolution whereas the standard one has only 320×240. It kind of makes sense that a doubling of the resolution could justify a doubling of the price. (I know that “upgrading” involves actually quadrupling of the total number of pixels but whatever.) Also the standard version should be enough for people who just want to watch the episodes once. But I have a couple of problems with the changes.
First, their main competitor for anime digital downloads is Funimation through iTunes and those videos are at the “premium” size (640×480 or 640×360) at the cost of the “standard” version ($1.99). Second, 632×480 is technically not DVD quality as far as widescreen titles like Welcome to the NHK or Red Garden are concerned, which usually run at 848×480 on the physical DVD’s. Finally, there is the issue of still only dubbed episodes being offered, a point that I don’t feel is as important as the other two but still worth mentioning since Direct2Drive is still offering subbed Death Note episodes at $1.99.
Complaints aside, I think it’s good that ADV is expanding its price structure and did manage to lower their large-res downloads by a dollar. I might be tempted to do a comparison among the two sizes and a DVD version in the future but not right now.
P.S. While I was browsing the downloads shop looking for a title that didn’t have the new pricing scheme, I did manage stumble upon an all-digital “SciFi DVD Bundle” that costs $487.66 in a Gilgamesh listing. Here is the list of titles included in that set:
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I hope those are premium sized files and I also wonder how long it would take to download the whole thing.
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