AnimEigo Announces New Documentary Series: The Anime Business

Long-running anime distributor AnimEigo, and parent company MediaOCD, recently announced the release of The Anime Business, a first-of-its-kind documentary series featuring interviews with a variety of pioneers of the Western anime industry. Details on this new show, and a link to the first episode, can be found below.

As anime has grown from modest beginnings into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, the documentary provides insights from many notable people that played important roles in helping to popularize the genre in North America at various stages of its evolution. The first episode is available now on the official AnimEigo YouTube channel. It features an interview with John O’Donnell, former Managing Director of Central Park Media.

Episode 2 debuts in March and features Robert Napton, former Director of Marketing and Producer of US Renditions at Bandai Entertainment. Episode 3 debuts in April and features Tim Eldred, the writer and founder of ourstarblazers.com. All episodes will be available in English. Japanese subtitles will also be available via a special grant from the Kleckner Foundation. Additional episodes and interviews are in production now.

The Anime Business is an ongoing series featuring a wide range of entrepreneurs and visionaries that helped to pioneer and shape the North American anime industry. It is produced and hosted by industry veteran and MediaOCD founder and AnimEigo CEO Justin Sevakis.

Sevakis was the original founder of Anime News Network in 1998, and he contributed many of the site’s most popular columns for many years, in addition to co-hosting ANNCast, the #1 anime podcast worldwide, from 2009-2015. Sevakis was the first in-house video and subtitle editor at Central Park Media, a prominent 2000s era anime distributor, and worked on Grave of the Fireflies, Project A-ko and many other bestselling releases. With his current company, MediaOCD, he has produced more than 1,600 Blu-ray discs for North American market and pioneered restoration efforts for classic anime including Project A-ko, Digimon Adventure, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and the forthcoming Macross II. He acquired anime distributor AnimEigo in 2024.

AnimEigo and MediaOCD invite fans that would like to help support and crowdfund future episodes of The Anime Business to donate at:
https://www.mediaocd.com/plans-pricing

The entire show can be found via the link below, with the first episode being viewable now!
https://www.youtube.com/@AnimEigo/videos

About AnimEigo:
AnimEigo is a division of MediaOCD and was founded in 1989 as one the first distributors to focus on anime and an array of acclaimed Japanese live-action films in the United States and Canada. Over the last 35 years, AnimEigo consistently broadened the market for Japanese content by cultivating audiences for new genres of film.

Renowned for high quality translations, subtitles, and dubbing, AnimEigo has released a wide variety of classic anime titles. For more information, please visit: mediaocd.com.