David Williams started the panel by simply opening up the floor to questions, so there are no announcements from ADV.  They are currently working on projects that are about 5-6 months away from being ready for release but they haven’t been announced yet.  So, here’s a summary of what followed.

Still have no plans for any Blu-ray disc releases.  David believes there isn’t enough mass in the market to support it, unless it’s a really big title.  If Best Buy doesn’t want to buy a Blu-ray for one of their titles, they don’t make one.

He repeated that any re-release of a title that was originally on VHS would need to be renegotiated for a DVD release.  Some of their acquired titles from CPM are close to release, such as Grave of the Fireflies which is set for July.

The discussion then turned to the relative anime bubble collapse.  David, speaking for his own views not ADVs, believes that there was just too many people release too many titles at the same time.  He related it to the video game industry in the 80’s when too many companies popped up and thus has a similar meltdown.  He believes the contraction in the market is good for the industry.  In a related answer, he stated that there doesn’t seem to be major bidding wars anymore for titles to be released among the remaining companies as they all realize the state of the economy and industry in general both in the US and Japan.  This is also evident in the lack of big A-titles even being made likely due to the production costs associated with these properties.

A very interesting question was also posed to Mr. Williams.  “With the recent interest by Hollywood in making Live Action adaptations from anime, do you feel that it will be good or harmful for the anime industry in the US?”  Williams believed that it could be both.  He relayed an example of when they were interested in acquiring the rights to, but the right holders were holding off to see if Hollywood was interested in it first.  The longer a title remains unlicensed from when it was aired, the less sales it will produce once, if ever, released.  So that was one case in point of harm.  The benefit of course would be that people would be talking about the title and find out that it originally was an animated series or movie and possible increase interest.

In response to a question concerning box set pressures, the panel responded that the market is the driving force behind the desire for and the releasing of box sets over single DVDs, not because of retailers in general.  (although they certainly do like things that take less space)

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