American anime industry

The chair of AX says the attendees of Anime Expo is averaging about 20 percent annual growth,
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/07/07/apop.DTL

but Ask John mentioned "The contemporary American anime industry is in dire straights. Evidence suggests that many of America's anime distributors are struggling financially."
http://www.animenation.net/news/askjohn.php?id=1123

What's this all about?

Prices are going down these days - a lot of companies are releasing "brick"-typed boxed sets for $50~ of entire series.  When someone can get 22 HOUR LONG episodes of a US TV show on DVD for $50, or 26 HALF hour long episodes of anime for $150, which will they buy?  600% price increase is unacceptable.  Yeah, everyone says that there's less demand for anime, so they have to decrease the price to inflate their profits - but maybe if it wasn't so fucking expensive, they'd have a little more of that demand they want.

BTW, the way to buy DVDs is not to buy each DVD individually - you gotta wait for the boxed sets.  Plus, they make it more worthwhile to pay for something, with pretty boxes, cool extras etc.