Once upon a time, there arose a great cause unto the ranks of the afficionados of Japanese Animation. Lord Nadelman, defender of truth, justice, and accurate subtitling issued forth a summons, a Request for Comments, that he might know the minds and hearts of the faithful and staunch throughout the land. Thus was born a survey, a census, a referendum, a man, a plan, a canal: Panama. You are now reading the results of that survey. I will comment on the results here, then offer the original message as posted to the net. Interspersed in that message are the results I collected: these will be bracketed by double lines of '=' characters. I will make the original survey, the raw results, and this message available through my homepage at the following URL: http://www.ccsf.caltech.edu/~mneideng/survey/ Since this term of math was Statistics, I have offered a few rudimentary stats where the questions admitted of numerical answers. I did not try to find covariances or anything "fancy"; this is left as an exercise for the marketing personnel of the anime companies reading this =) I did however, offer the ubiquitous _mean_, as well as the revealing _standard_deviation_. This permitted me to save space and offer a briefer summary of the results. Question 1: Well, it looks like everybody prefers subs over dubs, in accordance with the "conventional wisdom" about anime fans. This stat is even more impressive when taken in conjunction with questions 3 and 5. It seems to be a hotly contested topic whether or not the aversion of the "fans" (as present on rec.arts.anime) to dubs is present in the "public at large". Sales figures have indicated that dubs sell, but this may be due to a lack of available subtitles; the question is not to be resolved here. Question 2: This point has perhaps attracted the most controversy on rec.arts.anime. The argument for permanent subtitles seems to be that permanent subtitles are more flexible than closed captioning, and that people's existing CC decoders are liable to produce bad results even with "well-done" closed captioning. The argument for CC subtitles is twofold: closed-captioning can be turned off to allow viewing of the original "unblemished" program; also, combining two different audio tracks with closed-captioning on one side of a laserdisc provides an elegant and efficient way of offering a sub, a dub, _and_ the original program, all in the same physical space on the disc. Question 3: Shortly after circulating this survey, I became aware that the last two options I proposed did not currently exist in any production LD's: hence the question at least partially amounted to a format proposal. I also neglected to include AnimEigo's "Hybrid" format, which consists of a normal (i.e. permanent) subtitle on one side of a disc, and the dub of the same program on the other side of the disc, sans original audio as per licensing agreement (this was apparently done in response to concerns over "gray market" discs showing up). Looking at the results, one thing that becomes immediately clear is that normal dubs were almost universally the least popular choice in the question, underscoring the result of question 1. Though no surprise, this is a result that should probably be heeded by companies reading the survey: dubs are not well-liked by the respondants, and perhaps not by the larger market. Normal subtitles were the second most popular choice, though their standard deviation was the highest on the list. Qualitatively, this seems to be because normal subtitling was often either the pollee's first choice or the polee's fourth or fifth choice, perhaps based on whether they had confidence in the more exotic formats (3-6). Looking at the middle two options, the first of which is Pioneer's "Multilingual" format, we see a marked difference in preference between having the dub on the analog and on the digital tracks. In fact, having the original audio on the digital track was almost as popular as the straight subtitle (and with less spread of opinion), whereas having the dub on the analog track ranked as the second most unpopular option. Perhaps Pioneer and other companies with similar formats could answer consumer demand by switching their format to be in accordance with option 4; however, this survey is almost surely an incomplete gauge of what this "consumer demand" might be, especially if the LD's made in format 3 are targeted at those prefering dubs. It is a matter worth consideration. As to the last two (currently) gedanken formats, two interesting things are of note. The most popular format in the survey was format 6, which is amounts to a normal subtitle on the same disc as a multilingual release. This format is easily the most information-rich; it is also the most flexible, bringing the sub and the dub to people irrespective of quality of CC decoder, as well as offering the originally formatted anime to the "purist". The only real drawback to this strategy is that it requires both sides of a disc to pull off, meaning that the amount of new material available per disc is halved given constant format (CAV or CLV). This reduction in material is best considered in conjunction with question 4. The other interesting point was that several respondants gave preference to option 5 over option 6, even though option 6 is more information-rich and does not require any obvious tradeoff when viewing the disc. One hypothesis for this pattern may be that the respondants feared that adding the CC would delay the discs or increase the price; this is, however, entirely unconfirmed speculation. The best explanation may simply be that humans are not rational agents (much to the annoyance of economists) and will not always do what we expect. Question 4: As to the issue of whether or not CAV was important to the pollees, the response was almost completely neutral, with a very slight bias toward higher importance for CAV. Since this means that CAV is at least "somewhat" important to the LD-buying crowd, the companies releasing anime on LD should probably give substantial thought to offering material in CAV format. Looking at the results from question 3, I will draw a correlation about formats offering both a normal subtitle and some another incarnation of the same program on the same disc. Obviously, if the material to be offered is over half an hour, the disc cannot be CAV; this raises the question of what will be more popular, a CLV disc in one of the "composite" formats, or a CAV disc in another format. Given that CAV had at least a moderate importance for most respondants, the matter seems worthy of substantial thought. Of course, it is always open to the LD-producing companies to break up their releases into more discs so as to make CAV possible again; this has side effects that are both good (more liner notes to collect, more cover art to fawn over, more revenue for the company) and bad (more shelf space taken up, less revenue for the consumer). Question 5: I was truly impressed by the results I obtained in this question. As a relative newcomer to the anime scene, I have a modest number of LD's to my name, and wondered how large the collections of the more entrenched fans were. The answer is, in some cases, _quite_ large. One immediately notices that the average number of both imported and normally subtitled discs per respondant is over 11; even considering that the respondants of the survey probably had a larger vested interest than the "average" patron of rec.arts.anime, this number is rather impressive. Even more telling are the standard deviations: one can see that the high average is accounted for by several people having a small number of discs, while a few people have _scores_ of them. One participant in particular caught my eye by citing 80 subtitled discs currently owned: this represents more titles than I can easily think of off the top of my head. I suppose this is indicative of the difference between the "normal" and the "gung-ho" fan; what it means for market potential is left up to the company representatives reading this. After reading the first few responses to the "plan to buy" section, I realized that I was naive in expecting people to quote a hard number; responses of the form "many" or "lots" were the rule rather than the exception. Thus, it is up to the peruser of the results to get a "feel" for the pollee's plans. At least superficially, it looks like the LD market will not lack for patrons any time in the near future. Applying 20-20 hindsight, I realize that it might have been instructive to see how many of the respondants actually own LD players; it is not uncommon to hear of people owning several discs without owning the means to play them. Question 6: I did not include the comment sections of the surveys in this post for lack of space. It is once again up to the peruser of the survey results to browse the comment sections for himself. -----------BEGIN INCLUDED ARTICLE--------------------------------- Article 175082 of rec.arts.anime: Path: nntp-server.caltech.edu!mneideng From: mneideng@wrath.ugcs.caltech.edu (Mark L. Neidengard) Newsgroups: rec.arts.anime Subject: [POLL] PREFERRED FORMAT FOR LD'S (for USMC) Date: 3 May 1995 02:23:40 GMT Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA Lines: 68 Message-ID: <3o6pfc$6of@gap.cco.caltech.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: wrath.ugcs.caltech.edu The purpose of this poll is to furnish USMC with the distillation of opinions from participants in rec.arts.anime about the proper way to offer American-language formatted anime on laserdisc. I will compile all emailed responses and send the results to USMC, in addition to posting the results to rec.arts.anime and keeping a copy in my archives. The last time I will take responses is May 16, 0000 PST, 1995. PLEASE RESPOND IN EMAIL TO mneideng@ugcs.caltech.edu. Please be honest in answering the questions below. Though the topic is an emotionally-charged one, please try for as concise a tone as possible. ---- Question 1: (please ONLY mark a box in this section) I prefer: [ ] Subtitled anime over dubbed anime [ ] Dubbed anime over subtitled anime =============================== Subbed: 43 Dubbed: 0 =============================== Question 2: (please ONLY mark a box in this section) If both closed-captioned and normal subtitles were available, I prefer: [ ] Closed-captioned subtitles [ ] Normal (i.e. permanent) subtitles ============================== CC Subtitle: 19 Normal Subtitle: 24 ============================== Question 3: (please ONLY number the selections below) Please rank the following formats, with 1 being highest and 6 being lowest: [ ] Normal subtitle [ ] Normal dub [ ] Dub on DIGITAL track, original audio on ANALOG track, closed-captioning for subtitling (e.g. Pioneer's "multilingual" format) [ ] Dub on ANALOG track, original audio on DIGITAL track, closed-captioning for subtitling [ ] Normal subtitle on one side of a disc (with original audio), both dub and original audio W/OUT closed-captioning on the other side [ ] Normal subtitle on one side of a disc (with original audio), both dub and original audio WITH closed-captioning on the other side ============================== mean std. dev. Option 1: 2.867 1.753 Option 2: 5.822 0.490 Option 3: 3.622 1.370 Option 4: 2.888 1.283 Option 5: 2.956 1.331 Option 6: 2.600 1.338 ============================== Question 4: (please ONLY enter a number in this section) How important is CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) format to you, with respect to CLV (Constant Linear Velocity)? [ ] 1=extremely important, 5=unimportant ============================== mean: 2.956 std. dev.: 1.205 ============================== Question 5: (please ONLY enter numbers in this section) How many LD's of the following types do you: OWN NOW PLAN TO BUY Original Japanese [ ] [ ] Normal Subtitle [ ] [ ] Normal Dub [ ] [ ] Dub/normal audio & CC [ ] [ ] One side subbed, other [ ] [ ] dubbed w/out CC One side subbed, other [ ] [ ] dubbed with CC ============================== mean std. dev. Option 1a: 11.163 15.946 Option 2a: 11.568 16.447 Option 3a: 0.545 1.130 Option 4a: 4.841 5.570 Option 5a: 0.023 0.152 Option 6a: 0.000 0.000 [plan to buy data omitted] ============================== Question 6: Please enter any comments you wish to make below: ============================== [omitted] ============================== -----------END INCLUDED ARTICLE----------------------------------- -- /!\/!ark /!\!eidengard, CS Major, VLSI. http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~mneideng "Fairy of sleep, controller of illusions" Operator/System Administrator, CACR "Control the person for my own purpose." "Don't mess with the Dark Elves!" -Pirotess, _Record_of_Lodoss_War_ Shadowrunner and Anime Addict