Let’s just say one of the things I usually lament when it comes to coverage on OASG is the lack of a look inside the anime industry side of things. There’s definitely a lot of factors in play for why that side isn’t covered here, but I’d bargain at least 50% is due to my laziness.
At least for now, I can say I finally have some sort of look inside the anime industry, thanks to Senior Brand Manager at Crunchyroll, Tiffany Chen.
Tiffany Chen started working at Crunchyroll two years ago, and has since pretty much seen it all — from handling the anime scripts, to talking with Japanese companies, etc. With Crunchyroll having a manga service, it was high time to return to NYCC again, though this time without a booth and only two panels. However, with the turnout they had for each, this most likely won’t be the last time they return to NYCC…and they may actually have a booth there.
Anyways, I was able to speak with her during the convention and ended up asking some questions about a lot of things Crunchyroll, which also involves some decisions they’ve made for certain stuff this year, along with their future.
Organization ASG: So how did you get yourself interested in anime?
Tiffany Chen: I think like a lot of people my age, I call it the “Pokémon Generation”, I think for me that was really my gateway into it? I played the game and I really enjoyed it and after that you know I just sort of realized that there was a whole genre of anime that was just like Pokémon and that it originated in Japan and so I just sort of started watching from there, and as internet became more prolific, I Googled it and that’s how I discovered communities and the fact that there’s this thing called anime and there are more shows just like or even better than Pokémon.
OASG: How did you get the opportunity to work at Crunchyroll, and what is your current role now?
Tiffany: So, I’m currently a senior brand manager of anime at Crunchyroll. When I first started looking for jobs I always wanted to work in video games or anime but at the time I didn’t really know how I was gonna go about doing it and I thought, “Well, I can’t really code, so I’m just gonna do marketing and business,” and that’s what I studied in college. Out of college I worked for IGN actually because I got a job opportunity there and I was really into gaming so I took that. But after a while I did realize that I wasn’t super into the area I was working in, which was eSports, and you know, I love console gaming and I just tried but couldn’t really get into eSports, and so my general manager at the time was friends with our CEO and said, “Well you know, since you’re so passionate about anime I can send you an introductory email,” and that’s what he did. I literally just sent in my resume and I guess they liked me enough to ask me to an interview and I interviewed and got the job. So yeah, I just started as a regular brand manager.
OASG: How have your responsibilities evolved since then?
Tiffany: When I first started I did a lot of just…the daily nitty gritty, tasks that aren’t super fun but are super critical and just needed to be done. So things like making sure scripts and video got delivered from our Japanese licensors, a lot of confirmation, coming up with campaign ideas, like back then the team was really small. It was like me and two other people. Today it’s like 5 or 6. But back then we did everything. I just joked that we did everything that dad doesn’t do, so we were thinking up marketing campaigns, just running contests on the site, managing the community, of course going to conventions, it’s a large part of that as well. And the three of us just took turns managing that logistics wise. I did that for about a year and a half, and then this past January the team expanded a lot and my original senpai I guess you would call them had all kind of moved onto other departments so I became the head of the anime brand management team, and…you know I…my responsibilities are still the same, I still work a lot with Japanese publishers, getting approvals for art, PR’s, materials, but I also do a lot more just managing people and a lot of that is making sure my team has what they need to get their jobs done effectively, whether that’s resources, engineering time, or if they just have new roadblocks and they need me to kind of help them solve it. That’s sort of what’s more involving too.
But yeah, I generally still do a lot of the same things, I still go to cons — I feel like I go to even more cons now which is crazy because I thought I was gonna go to less and now I have more people — but as we’ve expanded, we’ve also expanded our con presence so it’s kind of like it grows in tandem.
OASG: What would you say has been the biggest couple of changes to how the company’s approached streaming anime since you’ve started there?
Tiffany: Well I started about two years ago so I actually haven’t seen a huge change but I think the biggest change was actually the formation of Daisuki. A lot of people ask me, “Well, do you see Daisuki as competition?” and I’m like, I don’t see it as competition but more as the fact that Japan’s acknowledging that streaming works. Even when I joined in 2012, Japan was still sort of in that stage of, “Yeah we have the rights and we can let you guys stream it,” but I don’t think they were completely sold on the idea that this would be a viable feature of anime distribution. And when Daisuki formed and was backed by a lot of Japanese animation companies like Aniplex and Sunrise, so I think the fact that they started their own streaming service I think is kind of acknowledgement that this is the feature.
OASG: Can you guys share what you guys gained from the Reddit AMA a few months ago, and if you have any plans on doing that ever again?
Tiffany: Well the Reddit AMA we thought that would just be fun to do because we actually get a lot of our traffic from Reddit so the marketing team was thinking it might be fun to do a Reddit AMA. Obviously, you know it didn’t go as…cleanly as everyone expected, but I think, all things considered, it went as well as you could expect from an AMA for Crunchyroll. I know we’ve had some controversial past issues and I’m not here to deny it, it’s true that we weren’t always a legal company and I think it’s important for people to realize that we’ve gone past that since then and that is no longer part of who we are. It is in our history and I don’t think we should try to hide it.
I think really just that Kun was also just sort of overwhelmed, like he had never done one before — I know we had done one super super early, back in like 2008, but that was sort of a whole team of people back when the company was so much smaller. So I think he did the best he could, and we was there to sort of coach him, but it was kind of difficult because we were all doing our other jobs at the same time, so it’s kind of like, “Answer this! Oh hang on I got an email to answer!” So I think the speed of which people asked questions was the hardest part, like you’re trying to answer one person but then ten thousand other questions jump up and you’re trying to decide which one to do so that I think was the most difficult.
OASG:…So that’s gonna be the final time you do the Reddit AMA? *laughs*
Tiffany: I don’t know if Kun would ever do one! Like I don’t think we should rule out another Reddit AMA but I think next time we will be better prepared. But no, there’s currently no more on the horizon *laughs*
OASG: So Crunchyroll’s been able to stream a lot of anime, especially nowadays. It feels like when it started, back in 2011, 2012, there was still anime that couldn’t be streamed, but now it feels like you got everything. How has that affected the productivity of teams that have to translate, time, subtitle, etc, the anime? Can you share how many people are working to do any of this?
Tiffany: If I could let you talk to our head of translation, Brian, I think he would just like explode on like a whole tirade!
I think about a year ago we were going through a crunch where we suddenly, I think this is when we ballooned all of a sudden to like 50 simulcasts in a season, we were really short handed on translators so we were sort of scrambling to look for people. But really, our translator team is extremely selective in who they choose and that’s why I think we have really good subs, so a good portion of it I really just have to thank our subtitle team. They work their butts off and took on like, a ton of titles, like 5 or 6 titles, each of them and they just wouldn’t sleep. I remember when we had Attack on Titan the turnaround time for that was so short, like we had people up until midnight every single week translating just because the turnaround time is so short. So I think really it’s just the strength of the team and their willingness to do this because, they knew we needed it and it’s the only way we would get the anime out.
As to how many people are actually on the team or what I don’t actually know. A lot of our translating team are actually remote, and they’re all around the world, which is kind of cool because it means there’s always someone awake to look at some show, and how if they’re here they don’t have to stay up until like midnight, we have someone from New Zealand and they can do it in the afternoon. I would say we have about…100 contractors? Maybe total? Of course I don’t think all of them are working on a specific show at a given time.
OASG: And I don’t believe you guys translate everything on the site because you have Aniplex and Sentai, they have their stuff correct?
Tiffany: Yeah, so it depends on which licensors we work for, some licensors they just give us the scripts and we translate it right away with our in-house translation team; other companies request we use their translations or they’ll work with another company and we get the scripts from them.
OASG: Do you know if there’s been any internal thought on price structure for certain regions since in most cases, they only get a fraction of the anime series each season?
Tiffany: That is something I think is mostly decided by our exec team. I generally believe that we want to set a standardized price system around the world, and you know, I know it does suck that not every single region has the same amount of access to materials but that’s why conversely instead of changing the pricing structure — which makes it actually kind of difficult to negotiate weekly contracts — we do rev share with our licensors, so part of the subscription cost goes to our licensors (Note: you can get more information on where the money goes here.). So if you subscribe, don’t think the money’s going to CR. It’s going to the licensors as well, and because we do that, I think it would make licensing exceedingly difficult if we actually split the pricing structure by region, because then it depends on like, “You only get so and so from this region and so and so from this region” and I think the logistics of that is probably not really feasible? So you know, the other way around is instead what we try to do is we’re honestly expanding to many more regions around the world since we started to do a lot more in other languages, and I can really see it even myself in the last couple of seasons, like you’ve noticed that we have shows that are Europe only. And people are like, “Why isn’t it in America?” And the thing is, we’d rather try and get it for as many people as we can, even if it means North America doesn’t get it because we have users in Europe too and we know that they want to see their shows too. Eventually our goal is to offer anime anywhere. We’re still climbing towards that goal, but we’re getting there, slowly.
OASG: How has the anime market changed in your view based on, I guess the fandom perspective before you joined Crunchyroll, and then when you joined Crunchyroll and up to today?
Tiffany: When I was first into anime like in elementary school people just thought of anime as cartoons, or maybe I just thought of it as cartoons because I was so much younger, and then I feel like we went through a huge boom in like the 2000’s? The DVD market, like I remember just going to Best Buy and buying and collecting DVDs and I felt like it was still sort of considered slightly…geeky I guess? But you know you can see a lot more DVDs all of a sudden just hit the market and then that sort of that fall where people kind of stopped buying DVDs after a while and…I feel like for a while they just stopped broadcasting anime as much on cable TV. Then all of a sudden we move to Youtube and then there was all these legal sources again and then Crunchyroll finally came up and now I feel like we’re seeing a second resurgence of anime like back on Toonami and Cartoon Network so it’s sort of like, that second rise now that I feel like people in my generation have grown up, it’s almost started to become cool again, like it’s weird, old things always become cool eventually so that’s sort of in terms of I guess the culture, I see that happening back again.
As for trends, I feel like conventions are now becoming a much, much bigger thing than when I was into anime as a kid, like I used to just go to one convention a year and it kind of felt like everyone did the same thing, but nowadays it seems like everyone, every club has their own convention and everyone’s going to all these cons. It seems like the new trend in anime isn’t simply just to watch and buy DVDs as it used to be but now to attend conventions and to hang out with other people who share your same passions. I really see an upsurge of conventions like, a lot, and even more so since I joined this job since I work a lot with conventions now.
OASG: What do you think is the biggest reason Crunchyroll has been referenced as the go-to site for streaming anime as opposed to Funimation, Daisuki, etc?
Tiffany: I think it’s a combination of a few things: one is our selection, we have a huge selection, two is the fact that we offer simulcasts, which, I know other companies do but I think we have the largest simulcast selection out there. We average 50 every season, which means that literally up to one hour it comes out in Japan you can actually watch it on our site. I think one of the biggest complaints that people back in the day was the fact that they had to wait months for DVD releases to come out and nobody wanted to wait so we kind of eliminated that by pretty much broadcasting ours after the Japanese. The third reason is our huge engineering team, like I believe our video player is one of the best out there, it’s not perfect, I will admit, but I think compared to what you have at other places I think it’s one of the best ones out there. And you know, we’re mobile, you can watch us on your phone, your console, we’re on a lot of different devices and I think that accessibility makes it easy for people just to pick up. It’s not like, “Oh I have to watch it on my computer or watch it on my TV.” You can watch it anywhere, anytime.
OASG: Do you think Crunchyroll will continue to stream anime or will there actually be an option to download potentially in the future?
Tiffany: I get asked this a lot and I think we had experimented with that at the beginning or considered it at least, but it’s just so difficult because obviously it’s really difficult to protect against piracy at that point and that’s a thing that Japanese publishers are wary about, and I don’t blame them. They are really hesitant about anything to do with — well, it’s not gonna be encouraging piracy, but it’s more like to them, they see it as more of a chance for piracy to happen, so I don’t really know. I know iTunes offers downloads and stuff, but I don’t know if we’ll ever get to that. I think right now we sort of see streaming as the direction we wanna go to so we’re focusing on that right now, and I guess if our licensors ever become more comfortable or if we ever reach the point where we feel like we can technologically come up with a way to offer it in a way that makes the publishers become more comfortable.
I mean, I think it would be cool, like sometimes I can’t always watch it when I don’t have internet *laughs*
OASG: What do you think everyone — from CR to the industry and to the fandom — should understand what’s going on with Encouragement of Climb, which I would say has been a pretty weird situation since there’s only one ep of S2?
Tiffany: Yeah, this was briefly explained in the Reddit AMA but…I can’t really mention super specifics but what happened was we already agreed with the licensor that we were going to get the show, and it turned out some parts of the contract weren’t fully fleshed out and weren’t signed, but they gave us the go-ahead to do episode 1, and since the contract was never really fully…executed? I don’t really know what the problem is also, that’s sort of up to the Japan team, but basically we’re in that sort of in that holding position where we try and work out details of it. I honestly really hope we can get this out to because I would certainly like to see it on the site as well. We know every single day that there are people waiting for this show and we do see everyone’s comments. We just can’t respond because we’re unable to and at this point it’s sort of out of our hands. We are definitely working on it, hopefully once this licensing season dies down we have some time to work on it and revisit that.
OASG: Finally, what does Crunchyroll got planned in the next couple of months and into next year I guess?
Tiffany: Next couple of months we’re definitely running on con season, we have our fall season coming up right now, we have Detective Conan, we’re gonna get the simulcast for that, and got some catalog titles, which is Ultraman, so some live action added to the site, we also got a slew of more J-Drama titles as well. I’m not sure what those are yet, but I’ll probably be finding out soon from my team. But yeah I think the next year’s…even better licensing, we want more regions, more shows, that’s always a goal of ours, we have a couple more devices down the line that I can’t quite say yet because they’re not ready, but we’re gonna be on more devices in a couple of months as well, I’m actually really excited for a couple of these. And also just more convention presence. Ever since I became head of the marketing team like I really wanted to try and expand our convention presence to more cons in general. We used to do a lot of bigger shows and maybe do it a couple times in the year, but I think it’s just as valuable to go to some of the smaller shows as well, so now that we have more people hopefully we can do that as well.
OASG: So basically you’re gonna be a World…no, country traveler I guess? *laughs*
Tiffany: Maybe not me specifically, we have more people on the team so we can take turns doing it, and internationally I think would be a goal for us, to go an international con, that would be very helpful. Aside from, we’ve been to Canada too which is really cool, but I think it would be cool if we could do maybe Latin America, Europe as well.
