BOST TV – Creating A Market For Niche Titles

This afternoon I watched the first episode of Keitai Shoujo on BOST TV, the newly launched anime digital distribution service. (Is it pronounced bost or boost?) It was a nice quick experience considering that anime was my only option for my region (USA) – I didn’t have the privilege to pay to watch episodes of Shinigami no Ballad or Hanbun no Tsuki, although I could watch the non-credit openings for free. What these three titles have in common, though, is why I am optimistic on how this venture will affect the online anime market by giving them a chance to make overseas revenue.

All three anime have about five or six episodes and would seem to be unfeasible to market on DVD than longer series that last 12 or 24 episodes. Part of BOST’s mission statement is to “bring [people] anime more quickly than before and titles that see little chance of a DVD release”. Keitai Shoujo was originally debuted on the Internet in Japan so it makes sense to let viewers watch that for free (especially given the short time length per episode) and also allow them to get better acquainted with how the system works. Shinigami and HanTsuki are both six episodes of 25 minutes each and at the “rental” price of $1.99 (100 points) for each episode, that works out to about 12 bucks for each “complete” series.

A couple complaints I have are the requirement to purchase groups of points and the regional viewing restrictions. Not being able to buy subscriptions to individual episodes without needing to pre-pay for a block of points is annoying but I will point out that Wii Points and Microsoft Points (for Xbox Live and Zune Marketplaces) are also bought in blocks of points as well. I am more understanding about the media restrictions because the company has to make deals with the Japanese producers to distribute under certain conditions and those can include restricting distribution to particular parts of the world. Note: According to their company info page, BOST Digital Entertainment is based in the Shinjuku part of Tokyo and has five million yen (US$45,200) of capital. So yeah, looks like the company is in its beginning stages.

Another common knock that I don’t share as strongly is the fact that the paid subscriptions for episodes last for 14 days so you don’t really pay to own the anime. Instead you pay for the privilege to watch it subtitled through the Flash player on their website. I don’t find this to be too troubling because it isn’t that different from a two-week rental.

Hopefully there will be more offerings on the service that will be worth me paying into the system. I’m glad I’m getting Keitai Shoujo complimentary for now and was surprised by how much got done in 5 minutes. If only other anime used their time that effectively… Anyway, this is a site to watch as we go into 2008 to see what other titles they can acquire for distribution and how effective their pricing scheme will be.

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