Posts Tagged “niconicodouga”

I received my first legitimate press release in the site’s inbox this evening and it did not seem exciting at first. It was sent by the The New Media Group and announced a collaborative content-sharing service to launch this December with Nico Nico Douga where Nico users will be able to view content from 20 “official providers” including as TNMG’s IPTV platform World On-Demand, MTV Japan, Avex, Bandai, and Livedoor. Wait, Bandai?!?

Yes, the anime and tokusatsu producer-slash-distributor is listed as one of many partners involved in this project (unclear if it is specifically Bandai Visual, Sunrise or both) so I have a little excuse to write about this. Frankly, there aren’t many juicy details except that Nico reportedly has 9.3 million Japanese (and secret foreign?) subscribers and commands either 2.3 or 2.9 million daily unique users, depending on whom from TNMG is trying to impress people. Simon Godden, President of e-learning service Teacher Tom Japan, thinks “this [deal] is a home run” so it must be great, right? Um, it guess it would be nice if you wanted to leave streams of comments on top of official music videos and foreign content as well as the swath of Touhou, IM@S, and Miku MADs that currently inhabit the site.

At any rate, you can read the entire release after the jump to get a few more optimistic quotes from executives focused on expanding the global reach of their managed brands.
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Have you ever wanted to see characters from your favorite anime series face off on a ballfield diamond? Well, some enterprising Japanese person set up a 16-team tournament using Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 14 to simulate the matches and posted the results on NicoNicoDouga with some added graphics to make them seem more televised. While there were obvious baseball inclusions such as Oofuri and Dokaben, there were also a few obscure choices like Maple Senchi and shojo manga Muteki no Venus by Ayumi Shiina. An added bonus was that the uploader also took the time to craft relevant chants for each team (i.e. “Star Rise” from Bamboo Blade), which made the whole thing all the more authentic, at least as much as a video game can be real.

Anyway, if you are a baseball nerd like myself and if you want to watch the matches, there is a video playlist containing them in sequence but for those who are not (and also lack Nico accounts), I’m also posting the results after the jump.
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I found this news report on Nico and want to say two things about it:

1) It’s odd but a bit nice that the synthesized-voiced reporter felt the Gurren Lagann/Sci-Fi Monday deal was important enough to pass along to the NicoNico audience (about 700 views worth). Here’s the related story from Anime! Anime!.

2) That was one of the driest news reports I’ve ever seen, but it does get the information across in a straightforward way.

For those who don’t know, Weiß Schwarz is a 2 player trading card game like Project Revolution where you try to beat your opponent by using characters from various series. In the case of the advertised TCG, the series currently involved include Zero no Tsukaima, Little Busters!, Disagea, and Persona 3. [Akibahara Channel]

Someone on NicoNicoDouga last Wednesday posted a MAD for the fifteen-minute long Lucky Star character song medley from ”Motteke Sailor Fuku Re-Mix 002″ and it has already gotten about 240,000 views. I had been waiting for something like the album came out and it looks pretty nice with different colored frames that slide on-screen to introduce each character’s portion and the utilization of a four-videos-at-once method that allows for more character screenage during the shorter segments of the medley. There was even a Densetsu Shoujo A segment paired with “Ore no Wasuremono”. Watching it helped me recognize some of the songs I hadn’t caught onto before (like Minami’s) as well as reminding me of a few moments I had forgotten like Miyuki supervising her younger relatives playing that “find the legend being described” card game, whatever it’s called.

P.S. Is it bad that I forgot that Ayano (pictured above) was a character until I watched this video? I mean, it’s not terrible because she was really a “background” character and didn’t seem to do all that much but that moment of realization still irks me a little.

The fifth thing from 2007 that had an impact on me as a fan of anime was creating an account on Nico Nico Douga. I had first heard of Nico Nico Douga in bits and places before May but I got my first true dose of Nico during the Damn You Internets panel at Fanime. Thus on June 1st I signed up for an account on Nico so I could see a swath of random Japanese videos with a bunch of comments streaming across them, some of them cleverly timed to flood over the actual video. At first I was able to watch videos from 1900-0200 JST (2-9am PST) since I was member 1,213,569 and the cutoff point for all-the-time access was 888,888. A couple weeks later, that line was expanded to about 1,100,000 and then a month or so after that, I had no time-of-day viewing restrictions.

The stuff I’ve been watching over the past six months has been mainly MADs and anime openings/endings, although I did find a TV episode of baseball bloopers split into three parts and earlier this month I watched a couple men with paper masks play their way through Wii Fit’s different mini games. The next step will be to begin watching the “raw” anime episodes that are on the service (especially the older ones like Lupin III), which now that I think about might be an interesting way to checking out series without downloading a couple episodes or, if licensed, buying the first disc or the first couple episodes digitally.

And remember, you can turn the comments off and just watch the original video if they become too overwhelming.