Why does it take so long to get old TV shows out on DVD?
And why only the first year out of 6 years of broadcasting. Is it a copyright issue, or syndication or what?
It’s not a copyright problem. DVD distributors issue the first season first simply because that’s the way the story-character arcs begin. If that DVD set sells well, they will release the other seasons. If it doesn’t sell well, then all you have is that first season.
I don’t know, but I have plenty of WAGs. As far as to why it takes them so long to be released at all:
First, the question of who owns ‘home video rights’ for those old shows might be a little murky, and it might be hard to buy up the rights from whoever ended up with them. (I’m not quite sure what happened before home video existed, I guess the home video distribution rights would by default lie with whoever had other publication right/ownership of the content.)
Secondly… there might be problems actually finding a decent quality recording of them to make into a DVD master.
Thirdly… or maybe this one should have been first off. There are a lot of business decisions and analyses that will need to go into figuring out if it’s even a paying proposition to release ‘the original Adams family’ on DVD. How many people do you figure would by the box-set if it’s 50 bucks and available at their neighborhood walmart? How many people would order it for 80$ off amazon? How much did Mister Wixley want for the rights anyway? Add in printing and distribution costs…
Why the first year is released first… this has just become standard best practice/convention in the industry I think. Sure, some people would snap up three seasons if you released them at the same time, but others might only pick their favorite. If you release season 1, more of the fans of the show are likely to buy it then and continue buying the series as it’s released, as a psychological thing. If the sales for season 1 tank, you can probably pull the plug on further releases and avoid losing more money. (On the other hand, some shows where even the diehard fans aren’t quite so wild about the early seasons still follow this pattern… the simpsons for instance, where I think there was increasing clamor about the first four seasons being released in order.)
I hope this has been at least minimally helpful.
PS: One show I can think of that didn’t release the early seasons on DVD first did so because there was a rights issue with the early seasons, or that’s the way I heard it anyway. The first two seasons of Reboot are in some kind of legal home-video-distribution limbo… I’m not sure if the rights are held by someone who absolutely refuses to use them, or if the rights were held by a company that went out of business without selling them off first, or what. But season 3 and ‘season 4/the post-season-3-tv-movies’ have been released on DVD, and AFAIK there’s very little chance that the early years will join them.
It’s not just rights to the show itself that can hold things up. The first season of The Profiler had an episode missing when it was released on DVD because the episode featured a song that they were never able to secure rights to. They released the set without the episode rather than hold up the entire set but a series that featured a lot of music could be problematic.
For example, one of the reasons we aren’t likely to see a DVD set of WKRP in Cincinnati anytime soon is that there was a lot of music used in the show and it would be very difficult (if not impossible) to get redistribution rights to all of it.
TV Series also change ownership sometimes. The franchise may be sold in the later seasons. If the original owner does not release the earlier seasons on DVD, it probably won’t be cost-effective for the current owner to release the later seasons. This happened with a Sci-Fi series (which I can’t remember the name of except it had the word “Earth” in the title and had a bunch of bald-headed aliens running things). The first season is owned by a different company, so although you can buy season 2 and 3 on DVD, the original owner hasn’t released season 1, nor have they sold the rights to do so. Duh!
Earth: Final Conflict? S1 was the only season worth watching.
In this day of cheap DVD creation and on-line sales, I too am surprised that all episodes of all old series aren’t available. Nobody needs to do advertising anymore. People will seek these old things out, and sites will specialize in locating them for you.
Seems to me that the month after somebody big enters this market it will explode.
Somebody like Amazon, Google, Yahoo, or Apple.
Once the agents get wind of it, they will be seeking out all the old owners of the rights to release them.
I too can’t figure out why this hasn’t happened yet.
You see where Dean Martin has an infomercial running about some of his old episodes. But why just some? Why not all? Just have the film librarian dust off the can and run it through the DVD burner. It’s a no brainer.
Some roasts may have been produced by another company so the people putting out the DVDs you’re seeing advertised may not have the rights to them.
The rights for some roasts may have been sold by the people putting out the DVDs.
There may be music within some of the roasts that creators don’t have the rights to.
People who appeared in the roasts (or their estates) may be exercising a right of publicity and preventing the roasts in question from being released.
The producers of the current roasts may be putting out some roasts to see if there’s a market before committing to releasing all of them.
There may not be a recording of the roasts of good enough quality to release on DVD.
And so on.
Eh, the first season is the only one worth buying. The consequent ones were spotty. The last season doesn’t exist. :rolleyes:
<i>SCTV</i> had its DVD rights held up for a long time over music rights as well as NBC controlling the rights to the show for a very very very long time.
Will there ever be hope for season 2 of Twin Peaks on DVD? At least I could find it on video.
But a day will come when video becomes as much of the past as needled phonographs. (I know DJs still use them, but audiophiles, not like they once did.) So let’s think ahead, Mr. Lynch.
The rights have been tied up by various and sundry for a long time. It’s announced periodically that TPS2 will be coming out but obviously it hasn’t to date panned out. Most recently it was announced last year that the rights would revert back to…someone…Paramount maybe? And that a new DVD set of both S1 and S2 would be forthcoming. The rights reversion supposedly happened in September.
What would cause them to skip over a whole season? Law & Order:CI has seasons 1 & 3 out on DVD, but season 2 is not out. What could be holding it up?
Another question: I know a lot of it has to do with who owns the rights, but it annoys me to see new shows releasing the previous year’s season right away, when there are other shows that aren’t even out yet. My husband is dying for Third Watch to be released on DVD and it’s not out yet (none of the five seasons), even though it was canceled last year. Yet you go in the stores and last year’s Desparate Housewives and Lost are already out. What gives?
Explain this to me. I get that the music is owned by whomever, and they need to sign off on it to get it released for inclusion on the show, but didn’t they already do that back when the show was originally made?
Talk to me like I’m five.
Broadcast rights are not the same as publication rights. (Under U.S. copyright law, broadcast does not equal publication.)
:smack: Feel free to call me a dumbass.
Google is already moving in this direction - you can buy some old TV show episodes right now.
Lost and DH were both wildly popular hit shows. The fanbase could be expected to run right out and plunk down their money (or go online and virtually plunk down their credit cards) shortly after the close of the season, so it was released quickly. Third Watch is an older show with a much less interested fanbase, so that could certainly account for delays.
There are different kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. When WKRP was on the air home video was in its relative infancy, and the idea that someone would pay to own a season of a TV show was pretty well unheard of. There were also serious questions over the legality of home videotaping to begin with, so producers were likely not looking at things like the mechanical rights to re-broadcast the original music. This is all WAG on my part though.