Why are Star Trek DVDs so gosh darned pricey?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve bought a lot of TV series on DVD over the years. On a good day, you can get a season of a silly sitcom like Full House in the low $20 range. A nice sci-fi drama like X-files or Buffy might go for $30- $40, depending. But somehow, Star Trek always seems to stay in the $80+ range? What’s up with that? They’ve dropped a little over time, but it looks like TNG and Deep Space Nine are just coming down into the $50 range now, 13 and 8 years after going off the air, respectively. But Voyager and Enterprise… still double a normal show!!

Is it simple supply and demand, and Trekkies will pay the price? Are they still paying off the special effect budget? Some weird licensing agreement? Any ideas?

2

Two words - cash cow.

3

Any item on the open market is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. A marketing strategy of maximizing the profit on each individual sale is just as valid a model as maxmizing the volume of sales with a lower profit per unit.

Clearly, there is a large enough demographic of geeks with cash to keep these dvds out of the price range of us cheap geeks.

4

This is exactly the reason why I have never bought the TV series, despite enjoying most of them just fine and would probably like owning them. They are just absurdly expensive. And there have been about five different versions of the releases, too, (double dipping) which just annoys me in principle.

5

I got all seven seasons of Voyager for about $28 per season.

6

Actually, the prices have dropped quite a bit. When the Star Trek:TNG dvds first came out I thought of buying them as a christmas gift but they were $150 a season. Now they’re $63/season or $300 for the complete series at Amazon. When those DVDs were $150, the X-Files seasons were $100 each (I bought 5 seasons at those prices, ouch), and they’re down under $50 now too. A few sci-Fi series started out a lot more expensive than other genres for some reason.

7

Q. Why are Star Trek DVDs so gosh darned pricey?
A. Paramount’s marketing department is run by Ferengis.

Ferengi Rules of Acquisition:

  1. Opportunity plus instinct equals profit.
  2. Greed is eternal.
  3. Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
  4. A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.
  5. A wise man can hear profit in the wind.
  6. Profit is its own reward.
  7. Never ask when you can take.
  8. Ask not what your profits can do for you, but what you can do for your profits.
  9. Enough … is never enough.
  10. The justification for profit is profit.
  11. More is good … all is better.

And the truest of all the rules:

  1. Deep down everyone’s a Ferengi.
8

For some reason, Paramount gave no MSRP to the original TNG DVDs, but suggested in a press release that they would be priced around $100 each. Of course, retailers usually set their own prices, but I’m unsure why they didn’t set their own MSRP.