Have you seen Bandai Entertainment's new website yet? They've been posting licensing and event announcements for a few weeks on a single page, while promising that something new was coming, and a little over a week ago the Alpha Testing site finally went up.

You can go back every few days and see the latest additions, and they're keeping fans posted, on their "Entertainment Blog," on what's been completed and added, what bugs have been fixed, and so on. It's an interesting process, watching the new site gradually come together.

This is all part of Bandai Entertainment's effort to reshape itself to move with the times. You'll remember that Bandai and FUNimation, a couple of months ago, both came out very strongly against fan download sites like Crunchyroll. It was noteworthy at the time that GDH/Gonzo decided to work with Crunchyroll and similar sites, making material available for download, while Bandai and FUNimation took a harder line. The reason for that, in Bandai's case, is clearly that they believe they can still reach fans directly by redesigning themselves and their site. They appear to have chosen their tenth anniversary as the milestone moment for beginning the process.

Bandai Visual, a corporate cousin, recently decided to straddle the "illegal-fan-download' and "pay-for-content" worlds by streaming some episodes free for limited periods on their recently launched Dot-Anime site. Whether the redesign of Bandai Entertainment's will include something similar remains to be seen. They'll certainly announce it on their blog, if so. (They've already made reference to "New Feature A - Waiting for final approval." Could it be that, perhaps?)

Meanwhile Bandai Entertainment obviously has big plans for the relaunched site, as it gradually adds and tweaks features. The main page is easy to navigate and is usefully arranged, although as one fan pointed out, the background is awfully...white. (Perhaps this is what makes everything visible and easy to navigate, however.) To the left on the page, you can click into the blog, listings and details for upcoming conventions where Bandai is participating (still pretty sparse, but slowly filling in), or the "Monthly Mailer" about the latest releases. To the right there are links to "Latest News" and a news archive (which, again, is pretty empty now but will soon fill up). The center of the page seems to be reserved for the most recent important announcements and the current month's new products, while products that are coming soon appear below that.

At the very top of the page, you can follow links to the blog, a section where there will be Bandai-related pictures, and another section on DVDs. That last section, so far, seems to be mostly a repeat of information already posted on the front page, but as the company adds more and more information to its online catalog, the DVD section will expand a great deal.

One thing mentioned in one of the first blog posts is that this site is not a store. So when you click on a DVD you're interested in, even though they've posted the price and all other pertinent information, you don't purchase it here. They post links to Amazon.com and RightStuf.com underneath all the DVD info, however, so you can easily click and buy the item at one of those sites.

It's going to be interesting to see how this new website continues to grow and, most especially, how fans respond. As "Anonymous" posted on May 15th, "This year will be very different. Things must change." We'll see if things change enough.