Anime Strike

~ the last words ~

Anime Strike never existed where I live, and that is the interesting thing about it. Amazon sold the channel in the United States only while buying worldwide exclusive rights to the shows inside it. Abroad the result was not a service you declined to pay for. It was a list of titles that had stopped being legally available at all.

It launched on 12 January 2017 as the first branded channel Amazon put on its Channels platform, at four dollars ninety nine a month on top of a Prime membership that already cost ninety nine dollars a year. The catalog ran past a thousand episodes and films, mixing older series with simulcasts coming off Japanese television that same season. A good deal of it came through Sentai Filmworks, and several of the better regarded shows of the year were locked in there and nowhere else.

Anime audiences had spent fifteen years being told the legal option was worth paying for, and had largely agreed to it. What arrived here was a second toll booth behind the first one, attached to a player and a subtitle track that were worse than the specialist services those viewers already used. Miranda Sanchez wrote an IGN piece headlined "Amazon and Netflix Don't Understand Anime Fans" and the headline did most of the work.

By the summer of 2017 the channel had stopped updating its own social accounts, which is usually the last public signal a product ever gives. Amazon closed it on 5 January 2018, a week short of a year old, and folded the catalog into plain Prime Video. Every subscription was cancelled without anybody having to ask.

~ the record ~

~ the two gates ~

The pricing mistake is easy to state. Prime is a bundle people buy for shipping and then treat television as a bonus, so a subscriber already inside that bundle reads an extra five dollars as being charged twice for one account. The specialist services could ask for money because that money was the entire relationship, with nothing else in the cart.

There is a second cost that Amazon never had to pay directly. Worldwide exclusive rights sold into one market mean the show is missing everywhere else, and the people who lose it have no way to hand anyone money for it even if they want to. That audience does not sit around waiting.

~ what happened to the shows ~

The library outlived the brand by a comfortable margin. Most of the exclusives became watchable on an ordinary Prime subscription the day the channel closed, and several later moved to Hidive, which is where Sentai's catalog sits anyway. The shows themselves were never the problem. The wrapper was.

~ what it proved ~

Amazon kept the Channels business and has never since put its own brand on one of them at this scale. The lesson everyone took away was about pricing, but the more durable one is about geography. A catalog is worth only what it is reachable at, and buying global rights in order to sell a national product converts a paying audience into a piracy statistic.

Anime is the genre where that has been demonstrated more often than anywhere else, usually by companies who believed they were the exception. It got demonstrated again inside twelve months.

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