PBC News:Is FUNimation Entertainment going bankrupt?

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This article is part of PBC News, your source for up-to-the-minute anime.

21 December 2008 

Martian Times: FUNimation Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Navarre Corporation, reports that three-fourths of the FUNimation staff including the writers and voice actors have been laid off.

FUNimation Entertainment distributes more than 75 per cent of anime titles to the Canadian and American market. It’s hard to gather what this actually means - is it that the FUNimation Channel is defunct or (more likely) significantly supported by Taylor Media Stations Group? (If you’re reading this, let’s face it, the anime industry is not dead yet)

But, according to the Navarre Corporation, there is a economic crisis taking place. Jared Hedges says it is:

Hearing that the company have lost their rights to distribute and license new anime titles. As a result, the FUNimation staff is unable to continue their distributions over the cable providers and are turning to Video On Demand (VOD) and Taylor Media-owned television stations to distribute anime across the United States. This is having a knock on effect on the domestic cable networks, which are getting a surge of anime programming needing to be canceled indefinitely. FUNimation programming need to be removed from the telecommunications gateways that passes broadcast transmissions in shorter signals around the 48 states to avoid commercial breaks – causing less quality programming and risk more anime cancellations, in turn causing the FUNimation Channel to be discontinued or be carried on Taylor Media-owned stations and increasing the pressure on national cable networks.

What (I think) this means is that companies’ public satellite services have turned down FUNimation. So, if they can get viewing rights from Taylor Media Stations Group, they have had to go on the private cable providers (including Taylor Media Cable) and VOD, like the rest of the average cable providers, to get their anime distributed. That results in more strain on the VOD networks, which means more anime companies go bankrupt and the anime industry becomes dead.

Here’s the biggest problem right now:

Anime companies [are] looking to settle disputes between the Canadian and American media. This financial outage means there is no real-time access to anime, for example, distributing anime titles. This means anime licenses are compromised when trying to place agreements. As cable networks are being affected, these companies are forced to rely on private satellite services (including TaylorCOM) that may have more efficiency and may also rebroadcast in reruns. The loss of money even precious pennies is rarely important to distribute anime titles. These private satellite services are now struggling to cope with peak in demand – leading to increased lay offs, and further compromising the suspension of distributing anime.

I’m told that these minor sub-channel stations break once a month. So companies have developed a rollback plan. If one sub-channel signal is out, anime is rebroadcasted to the main station. In theory, a dual affiliate, where one or more networks shares the main station at once, is called cherry picking. Prior to January last year, it had not happened before.

The problem with all of this is that it’s easy to see the impact, or its insignificance, until something suspiciously happens. So, we’re keeping an eye on FUNimation Entertainment and like we said, er, something’s happening to the anime industry.