Chapter 532 Kuramaroll’s Journey To The Top
Chapter 532 Kuramaroll's Journey To The Top
Tokyo Animation Branch Studio, Sakura City.
10:05 AM, Monday, January 11th.
Ryoko had just finished her meeting with the production team and the voice actors. She answered all the doubts presented to her the best she could.
When the voice actors bid farewell to her after the meeting, they all had a look of respect and admiration as they looked at her departing figure.
They started working as soon as she left, they wanted to put into practice the tips that Ryoko gave them about their characters!
Just like that, the voice actors spent the rest of the day working hard on their tasks.
Meanwhile, Ryoko entered another conference room appointed by Rio.
She needed a place to talk and sign the contracts with the studios, and a conference room would serve this purpose.
It didn't take long for the first studio representative to arrive. Ryoko was scheduled to meet several representatives, so this was only the first meeting.
The two sides had already discussed everything previously, so after a 10 minutes conversation, the two sides signed the contract. Each side got a copy of the contract while the original would be taken care of by their lawyers.
Rio had hired a small team of lawyers for the branch studio, and they were in the conference room as well. They took care of all the legal procedures for the studio.
The two sides agreed that the payment would be made in two installments. One in January and the other in February.
That was because the studio didn't have enough money in storage to pay for the viewing rights in just one installment.
Yesterday Theo sent her 15 million to the studio bank account, and he informed her that she could use this money to pay for the animes' viewing rights.
That's right!
Theo sent her the money he received from his earnings as Moonlight during December.
He figured that he shouldn't keep the money idle in his bank account until the end of the month. It was then that he remembered that he promised Ryoko to provide her with 30 million dollars for her to buy the viewing rights of recent animes. Although he didn't have all the money, he still had half of it. So, he didn't even hesitate to send the money to her.
With this money, Ryoko was able to fast-forward the negotiations with the studios.
The studios were already used to selling these viewing rights to other streaming services, so it didn't take long for the two sides to reach an agreement.
In the next few hours, Ryoko would meet around 15 representatives.
That's right!
Ryoko would only buy the broadcasting rights of 15 animes with the 30 million that Theo would provide her!
It may sound like a low number of animes considering that they would spend 10 million for copyrights of 200 animes.
But the two situations couldn't be compared at all.
In the second situation, Ryoko was dealing with relatively old animes that didn't provide any more profit for their studios. That's why these studios didn't care about selling the anime copyrights of these animes. With the copyrights, Theo's streaming service could maintain these animes in their catalog as long they wanted. Plus, no matter how many people watched these animes on the streaming service, Theo wouldn't have to pay a single cent to the studios that made them.
Which didn't happen in the first situation. Ryoko was going to use these 30 million dollars to buy the broadcasting rights and not the copyrights of these animes. This meant that they couldn't keep these animes on their platform for long. The time stipulated for each anime varied from what Ryoko agreed with the studios, some of them could only be kept for a year and others could be kept for 2 years. Plus, the studios would get a share of the streaming service profits the more people watched their anime.
Some people may ask why would Ryoko and Theo spend so much money to purchase these rights. When they even had to share part of their profits in the end.
That's because the two of them were aware that the streaming service would only be appealing to the public if they saw something in it that they knew of.
If they only had the old animes and the [SAO] anime in the streaming service catalog, very few people would sign into the streaming service. The two of them knew that as they released more animes, and the animes became successful, the people would still flock to the streaming service in the end. But that would take a long time to happen.
That's why they wanted to launch the streaming service with these popular animes.
Honestly, Ryoko and Theo thought that they were paying a bargaining amount of money for these 15 animes. Because they knew that as long as a large public was attracted to the streaming service, they could maintain this public in it as they released their own animes.
Some animes may be taken out of the platform one year later, but the Tokyo Studios would release several animes in this time that would be able to fill in this position. And the animes that the Tokyo Studios would release would be a success without fail.
If the studios that sold these rights to Theo and Ryoko knew about their plan, they would be extremely angry. In their view, even though they only took 2 million for broadcasting rights, the money they would receive through the profit share would be bigger. Indeed, they would receive a lot of money at first, but at the end of the contract, Theo predicted that their profit would decrease exponentially when the public got hooked on his animes.
This was a game of chess that Theo was playing, and he was playing beautifully.
Theo envisioned creating a streaming service so influential that every anime lover in the world would have to subscribe to it so that they could watch their favorite anime. He even predicted that some studios may even offer the broadcasting rights of their animes in the future so that they transmit their animes in the most famous animation streaming service in the world.
But that was only in the future, at that Monday morning, Ryoko still was stuck at the branch studio having several meetings with studios representatives.
Some animes she was buying broadcasting rights had great popularity, so she was only able to buy the rights for one year of broadcasting. But Ryoko was aware that this one year would already be enough to put into motion Theo's plan, so she didn't even try to argue with the other side. When they offered more time in the contract in exchange for an increase in the payment, she politely declined their offers.
One year later, they would regret even selling this one year of broadcasting rights.
Just like that, Kuramaroll started its journey to the top of the anime world.