The time was mid October 2006. It was a cool northern hemisphere autumn night in Tokyo, Japan. Two young men were winding down after a hard day’s work by watching anime of the new season. A scrolling text message crawled across the bottom of the TV screen, warning the viewer of the recent trend of unauthorized video sharing over the Internet and how such acts are against the law. One of the young men snickered: “Yeah, as if that’s going to stop people uploading it onto the Net,” and the other grunted in agreement. “Hey, YouTube is going to be bought up by Google, this means that YouTube is going to be playing by the rules soon,” continued the young man. “You know, what if we can make something like a legal YouTube for anime so that there’s no need for companies to make these ineffective warnings, and that fans anywhere can watch anime as quickly and as if they live in Japan?” said the other.

And from this short exchange, BOST Digital Entertainment was born.

The two men in this little story were Aaron Lai and I, Chou-Chun Fan.

Presenting the idea - a dream - to our close peers and friends, BOST gathered three more members - Nobu Taguchi, our business manager, Darin Kenji Ito, our production manager, and Todd Yoda, our translation lead - to the team to form our core five. Together we worked hard as a group, all with the aim to make this dream into a reality.

We were fully dedicated - to the point of what some would call insanity - as we all quitted our fulltime jobs to pursue this dream. BOST was officially incorporated in February 2007 with capital just shy of 5 million yen (~US$49k) which we had pooled together from our own savings, and we started our little quest of approaching companies in the anime industry trying to sell our idea.

We started to approach the companies as early as December 2006, aiming to gather some shows for, at that time, a-too-ideal April launch with then upcoming shows that we had our eyes on (just for reference, some shows we went for include Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Lucky Star, and Darker than Black, just to name a few). However, the reception was far from encouraging. Of course, who could blame them? After all, we were nobodies, with no track records, no industry backers, and no deep pockets. To them big boys, we were just five crazy guys with an even crazier idea.

Months passed without solid results and pressures were mounting on various fronts, with the team becoming increasingly discouraged and financially hard-pressed. There were times that we even thought about giving up or resorting to less-than-honourable ways, similar to how some other video-sharing sites on the Internet got started, but we wanted to do it right. So, we stuck with it and pressed on. It wasn’t until almost a full year had passed that we had finally signed some deals which would put us on the anime industry map, and BOST TV officially launched on 26th November 2007. We knew it was a limited selection, but it was a start, and a step, albeit a very small one, to realising our goal.

As Aaron has pointed out in the previous post, the fruits of our labour are almost ripe for harvest. We have some great news to announce very soon, the entire BOST team (all five of us!) is very excited, and we think that anime fans will be just as excited with this piece of news.  So till next time!

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