1 Is there an alternative? I tried Veoh, it is too insignificant.

2 Most of the other players are insignificant (Veoh, Vimeo and such) or tied to a particular site (Myspace).

I tried to get the mee.tv domain back when I was setting up mee.nu (I do have a bunch of mee.* domains, which I will one day get set up properly), but I think someone snaffled it a couple of weeks before I thought of it.  I haven't been that upset, though, because hosting online video is a financial and legal minefield, largely because the rights issue is such a mess.

I mean, they're taking down opening credit sequences.  It's free advertising!  Do they imagine that people watch the opening credits on Youtube instead of watching the show itself?

Well, I mean, I do, but then I buy the show on DVD.  And still don't watch it, but hey.

3 They might watch the OP on Youtube instead of buying the single...

4 That's true.  My Kannagi OP got pulled following a complaint from Sony Music - not the animation studio or the mangaka, just the company releasing the CD single.

To which I say - pleh.

I'm not arguing that they don't have a right to do this - although it's quite possible that in this particular isntance they don't, unless Sony Music have worldwide distribution rights for the music from Kannagi itself, rather than (say) Japanese rights specifically for the CD single releases.

What I'm arguing is pleh.

5 And it's such a cool OP.

6 I don't know if this is something you're already aware of, but something is very sick on the server. On mee.nu sites, and also on Wonderduck's site and yours, sometimes the CSS doesn't load and sometimes I get fatal CherryPy errors. Also, that post I made this morning about the upgrade is gone, and I didn't delete it.

7 Sorry!  All fixed now, including the post that hid itself.  We're getting some weird out-of-memory condition on the old server, which is why I'm so keen to get us moved.

8 With music rights, usually the ownership is retained by the music company and permission is given to use the music in the anime worldwide.

Occasionally it's NOT worldwide. More than one show has had serious problems because the original music rights were only granted within Japan, and thus the rights to the music would have to be purchased separately in order to distribute the anime outside Japan. Usually this is enough to sink any distribution outside Japan at all - rarely do foreign anime companies and Japanese music companies have a similar view of what constitutes a "reasonable" licensing fee. (Usually the music companies want significantly more than the anime company stands to make off the whole show.)

Not really fond of the Kannagi OP. I prefer the ED...

9 Okay, wasn't sure how that worked.  I do know that some anime series have been released in the US with different music - Speed Grapher, for example, and, lamentably, Kimba.

I can't even remember the Kannagi ED offhand.  Mind you, I have klezmer music playing on my headphones right now, which makes it impossible to think of anything else.

Oh, it's just switched to a dance number.  That's better.

Until it gets to the bubbly bit.  I don't really like the bubbly bit, but it has to be in the first track so that I can then not have it in the second and third tracks.  It doesn't have the same effect if it's not there at all.

Whoa.  Ow.  I don't need that +6db boost on the dance tracks.

10

There's one example maybe of that which I've never really understood. In one episode of first season of Vandread, the Japanese sound track features a really good performance of the English-language song "What a wonderful world". It's sung by a woman, and I don't know who it is. Her accent is perfect, and from the timbre of her voice I'd guess she was black. But I've been fooled before, and she could be Japanese.

It's an important scene, and the music -- and lyrics -- are important to it. But for the English dub they got rid of it and put something else there. I don't remember what it was, but it wasn't anything remotely as good. It just sounded like background music, not like a message.

I always assumed it was a licensing issue -- except that when it was distributed here, the Japanese language sound track still had "What a wonderful world" in it. So if they could distribute that, why couldn't they do it in the English dub too?