First Anime Post - The Next Step

I'm surprised I haven't really talked much about anime here yet. Then again, I had been watching them a bit sparingly the past year or so. Unfortunately, I'm not going to list all the anime series that I've watched, since there's no way I'm going to be able to list them all anyway. >_>; I will mention the anime I have been watching recently though. Even before that though, here's the results from the poll I put up around New Year's.

The results...

Do you have a new year's resolution for 2012?
No: 2 votes
Yes, same from previous year: 1 vote
Yes, both a new one, and a previous one: 1 vote
Yes, a new resolution: 0 votes

Not sure what to say with this small sample, honestly. All I can say is that half the people don't even have a new year's resolution... based on the 4 people that voted. I know that more people have visited the site since then, but people don't seem to feel inclined to vote in them for some reason. I wonder why?

Anyway, onto talking about anime. I've been very behind on a lot of anime, and I still am, really, but I've managed to catch up to what's currently being aired in Japan with One Piece finally. I've had a huge gap between the time when Toonami on Cartoon Network stopped airing the show, in the middle of the whole Skypia arc, and when I started watching it again in Japanese. I certainly do prefer my anime in Japanese over English dubs, usually. Especially when some bad companies like 4Kids butcher them. I was especially upset when Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo got licensed in the US when the show was still being aired in Japan. On top of that, they killed so many of the jokes, cut so many scenes, and just... made it so that it made a lot less sense than it already did in their attempt to close culture gaps and such. =/ I have to ask whether if butchering anime for the sake of targeting younger audiences in the US is really worth it. Because that's when most anime gets completely butchered.

Also, I do have to say that watching anime sure has gotten harder now with many sites having taken down many episodes from their servers for illegal uploads of copyrighted material, especially after the whole SOPA and PIPA mess and Mega Upload getting taken down and everything. However, I can't complain since the publishers aren't profiting from people watching them from these sites, and makes me wonder whether if there IS a way for the publishers to profit from people watching episodes from the internet.

I see a lot of sites starting to show ads and commercials before the actual videos start. It's a great way to get the ads viewed by people visiting the site, and an effective way to get paying sponsors, I would imagine. I would suggest that anime publishers do something like this on their own sites, if it was a lot easier to set this up internationally. The difficulty in showing ads internationally is that not all ads apply to everyone around the world, so showing sponsor ads that aren't relevant to a certain part of the world won't do them any good. So you'd need sponsors for each region of the world to really make this work, and it's definitely a lot of trouble for the publishers to handle just to make it work on the internet. Sooo... I'm wondering whether if a third party video hosting site be in charge of all the paying sponsors, and the hosting site can pay the publishers to have the anime be hosted on their site? That's the best idea I have in terms of having anime be aired on the internet without losing profits for the most part. Of course, sub-titles and/or dubbing is a whole another issue...

Wow, I just realized how big of a tangent I just went off on when all I meant to do was talk about the anime series I've watched recently. o_o; So I'm caught up on One Piece now, finished watching Angel Beats, Bakemonogatari, currently watching Nisemonogatari, Tiger & Bunny, Persona 4, Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko, and... some others that I probably forgot to mention. With the rate of me watching them (usually while I eat lunch at the computer every day), I'm sure I'll be checking out more anime sooner or later.

Hopefully watching anime won't be as hard as it is right now, and that the publishers could possibly make the changes to make it easier to watch them without having to buy the DVDs or something. I mean, profit can be made from other sources than DVD sales, right? I'm sure that's the best, but... that's where people go to get the DVD extras and stuff, so there will still be buyers, I would think. It's only just a thought though, and if there's a problem with this idea, please, point it out to me in the comments. I'd like to know all the difficulties in making this idea a reality.