I believe I’ve heard it said that one sign of a good con is how many different places you’d like to be at the same time throughout. By this measure, AnimeLA was pretty good: I often wanted to be in at least two places at once. So even though Funimation representative Sully held maybe 5 panels over the weekend I only made it to parts of 2 of them:

Funi industry panel (on Friday)
This was a pretty straightforward industry panel of the kind you’d read about at Anime Expo – talk up the company, show some trailers, talk about upcoming releases, Q&A as time permits. Points that stood out to me:

• Kamisama Kiss is Funi’s most popular streaming title ever
• Funi app in development for new Samsung TVs.
• Funi is getting original Black Lagoon dub cast together for Roberta’s Blood Trail
• Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine release due “before the end of the year”, featuring Sonny Strait as Lupin. No mention was made of other dub casting for the show.
• Tenchi War on Geminar (aka Issekai no Seikishi Monogatari aka Saint Knight) probably out before summer
• One Piece Strong World due out this year, per #AnimeLA FUNimation panel.

Funimation Town Hall (on Sunday)
This panel was a little more behind the scenes in terms of Funimation’s process, business philosophy, numbers, etc. – it didn’t seem designed to provide information for any press in attendance so much as to help fans get a sense for how things work (and so Funi could hear about fans’ concerns). Of course, all this was done in a fairly high-level and diplomatic no-names-will-be-named way. Here’s what I got out of it

• On Fansubbers: “Even now, a lot of fansubbers aren’t breaking the law” – meaning that w/o a US licensor, only the Japanese can go after fansubbers, so it’s (effectively?) legal. The upshot of this is that Funimation tries to announce their licenses ASAP so they can keep fansubs for a show from getting entrenched.
• Working with rights holders: Chaos;Head took a long time to release – that was apparently due to a horrific art approval process. Funimation’s philosophy is that they want to maintain a good relationship with rights-holders, so they’ll never jump the gun; if they license a show and are told to sit on it, they’ll do so indefinitely – they said something about always seeking permission rather than forgiveness, and how if told to jump they’d ask “how high?”. Funi views these good relationships as key to the reason they’re still around and some other anime companies aren’t
• Workflow: Funimation is transitioning to getting more of their material digitally on hard drives and in native HD. Apparently upscaling SD video can cost months (because of quality check iterations? They didn’t explain how that worked). I noticed that even getting materials digitally still seemed to involve moving physical drives around rather than just setting up some sort of file transfer. Sully also mentioned that the dubbing process itself is about 60% of the production time for a show.
• Releases: “Physical media is going to remain a large part of our business paradigm for a long time to come.” Funimation mentioned that they try not to release anything on HD unless it looks markedly different than on SD, so if they don’t have High Def materials they’ll only upscale the SD stuff if they’re high enough quality to support the upscale. Some shows aren’t – they were shocked that FLCL was worth upscaling. They’re also aware of issues with their streaming services, and are working out kinks with the Roku app in particular; they’re also in the middle of refactor ALL the Funimation apps (including funimation.com
• Outreach: “Both Trigun and Summer Wars did very well theatrically” (meaning that they were profitable – Funi’s theatrical runs are usually more promotional than directly profit-oriented). As far as con support goes, they have a program called No Cons Left Behind, but even so the proliferation of conventions with 1000+ attendees is challenging to support – when Funi started trying to support cons they were looking at a few hundred of them nationwide, and now they’re apparently dealing with thousands (I’m not sure if I heard this correctly). Sully indicated that she’d personally attended something like 37 cons in the last year. She also said that Funimation hoped to be back at AnimeLA next year (2014).