Studios have to pay for the sub and dub when in contract with Netflix HQ

It definitely depends and I could see it going either way.

When you have a smaller, anime-focused company like Funimation or Sentai, I imagine that a large portion of their profits come from BD sales. Bad shows and/or bad dubs presumably sell worse than good shows with good dubs. Marketing for anime is probably an inexact science with tons of variables, especially since not all anime viewers even care about dubs, but I think that there would be a correlation between BD sales and dub quality. I'm not saying that it's more than a niche subset of anime fandom, but there is a "no dub, no buy" crowd, so there are at least some customers that place some value on the dub.

Netflix, on the other hand, isn't really doing the physical media or a la carte thing. Anime is just a tiny, tiny drop in a very, very large programming sea. It's numbers in a database, allowing Netflix to say "We now offer n+1 shows" whenever they acquire exclusivity over an anime series. Honestly, I think that's the full extent to which Netflix cares. They picked up something that people will watch, and the size of their catalog is their marketing and their revenue: more shows means more potential subscribers.

Obviously, they have metrics to show who is watching what when, in order to know whether a particular show is worth investment or not. I doubt that many people watching anime through Netflix would drop the show over the dub's quality. Most viewers would probably just flip to subtitles if they still liked the core show. If the Netflix subtitles are inaccurate, there's no way for the viewer to know that unless they research alternate translations or the viewer is fluent in Japanese to begin with.

Like, for examples, there's no way to know that the script in Violet Evergarden dub episodes 1 and 2 specifically contains translation errors unless you also watched the Asenshi fansub. If you didn't have access to the more contextual translation, the errors in the dub could be chalked up to poor writing in general or in the source as opposed to a shortcoming of Netflix's contracted staff.

An unhappy customer is still a customer, so unless droves of people are unsubscribing from Netflix and citing poor or inconsistent English anime dubs as the reason, Netflix has zero incentive to change their model. If anime viewers are a tiny fraction of Netflix customers, and then any fraction of that subset dislikes some of their English dubs, and then only a fraction of that subset abandons the show or Netflix instead of flipping to subs, then Netflix's metrics are going to remain more-or-less intact. Companies generally only make changes when their profits are affected; they aren't going to care if people watch in English or Japanese, they won't care if people complain, they only care if people watch.

Funimation, Sentai, and even expensive Aniplex probably make a lot of their money from the sale of individual series. The over-all quality of that release (which includes the dub) likely has a strong influence on the financial performance of a particular show. A bad dub could lead fewer sales.

Netflix, based entirely on a subscription format for access to tons of shows, probably doesn't get a ton of subscriber fluctuation based on the presence or quality of a tiny handful of those shows. A bad dub would barely effect their subscriber numbers.

/r/anime Thread Parent Link - twitter.com