The Anime Industry, Networks of Participation, and Environments for the Management of Content in Japan

Video-sharing sites like YouTube and streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, along with unlawful platforms such as Anitube, are environments of consumption enabled by increasing transnational consumption that are pushing for transformations in the Japanese animation industry. Among t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inArts (Basel) Vol. 7; no. 3; p. 42
Main Author Hernández, Álvaro David Hernández
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.09.2018
Subjects
Animated films
Animation
Anime
Business
Consumers
Consumption
Culture
Digital media
fan culture
Franchising
Intellectual property
Internet
Japanese animation market
Kadokawa Dwango
Manga
media mix
Niconico
Participation
Steinberg, Marc
Subcultures
Theory
Trends
User generated content
Web 2.0
Japan
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Summary:Video-sharing sites like YouTube and streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, along with unlawful platforms such as Anitube, are environments of consumption enabled by increasing transnational consumption that are pushing for transformations in the Japanese animation industry. Among these platforms, the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation is known to rely on the integration of consumers’ practices and the needs of the animation industry in a changing and challenging era of transnational content flows. In this paper, I focus on the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation, a major player in the contemporary media mix, and its pushing forward of the creation of an environment that integrates two different stances on cultural content: one which represents the industry’s needs regarding cultural content as intellectual property, and another that represents consumers’ practices and which regards content as a common or free resource for enabling participation in digital networks. I argue that rather than the production of content, it is the production of value through the management of fictional worlds and user’s participation in media platforms that lies at the core of the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation’s self-proclaimed ‘ecosystem’. This case represents the transformations in the Japanese content industry to survive the increasing transnationalisation of consumption and production.
ISSN:2076-0752
2076-0752
DOI:10.3390/arts7030042