And this is why the market fails in the UK. I understand they have costs to cover but in a world where people expect to pay at most £29.99 for a COMPLETE series asking for triple that is a complete joke. And that's the people who buy packs day one. The general public (and if you want to expand the market you want to target the casual consumer) is the kind of person who waits for the sales and let me tell you seeing anime with a blue ribbon price is rarer than a silver slime in Mt. Moon.
The problem is that the initial costs of producing materials for releasing shows to just the UK is completely out-of-line with the size of the potential market. Blu-Ray is still expensive to master, has high minimum orders quantities, the licensing costs Sony charge per disk-master are still ludicrous, and there's also the mandatory BBFC charges on top of that. The only reason that Kaze gets away with releasing stuff on BD is that they're mastering these releases
in France - they're being subsidised by the larger markets in France and other European countries in which Kaze deal. Manga themselves can't really afford it on anything beyond movies at this point because most of the TV releases they flirted with in the past failed to so much as break even.
Also, you're never going to see anime priced at the same level of mainstream TV boxsets, as retail is the primary revenue stream for local distributors (and for the Japanese licensors monetising outside of Japan) , whereas it's a secondary one for mainstream TV. It gives them a lot more flexibility when it comes to pricing, as does the larger market.
But, hey, I think we are getting pretty much the cheapest Madoka Magica BD release in the world, though the rumblings are that it might not hang around the shelves very long...
All the blu-rays in the HMV here are just dumped in one set of blu-rays, so good luck on finding anything!
Huh. Of the two HMVs I go into on a semi-regular basis, one has the anime BDs in with the World Cinema (though it's really 90% anime anyway), and the other has it's own anime subsection. I guess it's down to the local store management rather than dictated centrally. It's not like the UK distributors have any control over that (or the number of copies of a title these stores tend to order, or if they'll order a show at all - the supermarkets weren't even interested in Summer Wars!).
