The Anime Industry 5 Years From Now

I've been reading a lot lately. Particularly Fred Patten's book, Watching Anime, Reading Manga, about spending decades as an anime and manga fan, as well as Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life, about his life as a manga-ka. It's got me thinking about the long view: what the anime, manga, and light novel industries will look like in the future. Predicting the short-term future is dull; predicting the long-term future is futile. Five years from now, though; that's an interesting time frame. Here are my wild ideas.

 

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'''Most anime will be consumed digitally. ''' Much of it will be on the computer, but five years from now I expect to see a lot more set-top boxes that stream anime, like the PlayStation 3 (or 4 by that point), Apple TV, and the Roku. It'll be easy to buy and watch it that way.

But anime fans like to own physical media, so Blu-Ray will have taken over the market from DVD. Moreover, we'll probably be hearing about the  next big thing after Blu-Ray. There will undoubtedly be quality improvements, though I suspect that viewers will also expect more extras filling out those Blu-Ray discs, just as DVD (eventually) brought about many more extras packaged with releases than were released with VHS tapes.

About '''half of all U.S. releases will come from Japanese companies. '''This may be through English subsidiaries of those Japanese companies. There's just less need for independent American licensing companies; the Japanese can hire translators and press discs as well as anyone.

Combining those three trends:  '''Digital releases will be cheap, but physical releases will be expensive. '''Digital releases will follow the iTunes model: each episode will cost a dollar or two (as on Amazon Video-on-Demand for Anime), or will require a monthly subscription (as on Crunchyroll). Physical releases will mirror Japanese releases: packed with extras, extremely high-quality, and very expensive (remember, they pay about US $30 per episode over there).

That said, I also suspect that Japanese companies will have figured out the American market pretty well, and will see healthy profits from solid releases. Americans won't have to pay full-scale Japanese prices, the way the Honneamise label tried to run itself.

We'll see a major uptick in light novel releases and interest. This is the dark horse of the industry. Light novels have the potential to attract mainstream attention, since there's no weird art style to get used to. I expect to see at least one light novel go at least mildly viral outside of anime/manga fandom.

'''Manga fandom will increase, but the manga industry will grow modestly. 'I'm seeing more and more people interested in "fringe" manga (titles that didn't originate in Shonen Jump''). With titles like A Drifting Life attracting mainstream attention, I can see increased interest in manga, but I think the manga industry has reached a saturation point within the publishing industry. People will still seek out manga -- and I suspect more people will seek out more obscure titles -- but the manga industry won't explode.

Fansubs and scanlations will continue essentially unchanged. There may be slightly fewer of them in the future, but they'll still be around. You can't put the Genie back in that bottle.

What are your predictions?