Oy Veoh!
Make no mistake. At Funny Little Men, we like a bit of Fine Art. Every now and again, we rejoice in standing in front of conceptual art whilst rubbing our chins and nodding approvingly. Often we find ourselves going to an art exhibition with the entire crew, all for the price of one ticket.
This post is about our other side though...
Allow us to introduce you to Veoh. It's a bit like YouTube, but the posted videos are much better quality and a higher resolution. As a result, the file sizes are very, very big. So only continue reading if you've got a big, big broadband cable and no download limit.
Veoh, just like YouTube, contains a lot of animation, and most of that is Japanese animation. Simpsons episodes do pop up every now and again but get deleted very quickly due to the obvious copyright infringement. No such rules seem to apply to Japanese animations though.
Basically, Veoh is the perfect platform for rummaging around in the murky world of Japanese television series. It's bursting with so-called fansubs, Japanese animations taken from imported DVD's or recorded from Japanese television that are subtitled by non-professionals.
Truth be told, there's a lot of rubbish amongst these series. But somehow that makes the whole search for that one quality item all the more rewarding.
At the moment, the Funny Little Men crew is taking some guilty pleasure in watching Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann. A modern take on the fighting robots genre with a dash of retro design. Big guns, big fighting robots and well endowed girls in bikini's. It's totally over the top, very aware of it's own silliness and completely free of any intellectual pretence. A big, screaming loud roller coaster ride like only the Japanese can make 'em.
We'll talk a bit more about some of these Japanese television series in upcoming blogs.
Incidentally, our research department, aka "someone told me in the pub", claims that Michael Eisner, ex-Disney CEO and Time Warner both pumped a lot of money in Veoh. Eisner is even member of the board of directors. There's something weird about these people having such big stakes in a platform that at the moment thrives a lot on unlicensed Japanese animations.