$49.95 for a DVD of the Charles Dickens presentation (two hours) on PBS? Why does it cost so much? Seems like everything I see offered on PBS costs two or three times as much as DVDs of “normal” movies and TV shows. I could understand 50 bucks if there was a companion book, but not for a two-hour show.
Is it because the DVDs are being purchased by educational institutions, who have bigger budgets and can write off the cost?
I protest.
Volume.
They may sell just a few thousand copies whereas a “commercial” release like The Incredibles will sell in the millions (about 17 million, IIRC).
If a school is purchasing a DVD, it better get one with public performance rights too or else the school would be violating copyright law since most DVDs are sold “for private home use only”. Not that anyone really gets too worked up about it. But if a school buys a DVD and shows it to the whole school, that would be considered a public performance from my understanding of U.S. Copyright law.
Business training DVDs are really expensive because of both the volume and the fact that they are licensed to show to groups.
There are “special” versions of some DVDs that are produced for school use. IME, they don’t have previews of other shows or special features that most DVDs seem to have.
You do need public performance rights to charge admission or to show a film to a large group of people. However, classroom use generally comes under “educational fair use”, and most companies don’t need the PR black eye from suing a school for improper use of its materials. Furthermore, the “Cable in the Classroom” program allows teachers and librarians to record programming commercial-free and without any sort of copyright strings attached.
That said, the sale of videos and other ancillary products is a not-insignificant part of PBS’s budget; they claim 12% of their operating revenue comes from product sales. For a $333 million budget, that works out to almost $4 million. It’s not the biggest single revenue stream, but if people quit buying their products, that’s $4 million they’d have to get from us or from other sources.
Robin
History Channel stuff is expensive, too.
Part of it is that you get to watch the Dickens commercial-free and PBS has to recount that cost another way and part of it is limited demand. It’s not like all the Blockbusters are going to order multiple copies of this.
Volume. Makes sense. But if they were cheaper, more people might buy them. Then they’d have volume.
(I really did get an A in Economics, but I think the teacher liked my pretty graphs.)
Only in a theoretical sense. Demand does have an upper limit, where only a drastic reduction in cost is going to see any marginally significant upward shift in sales. It’s called a demand curve for a reason. I get the sense that “Goiter removal: A History” just isn’t going to be a blockbuster if you gave it away
I’ve never heard a woman refer to them as “pretty graphs”. 
I’m with Ms. Robyn here. My wife, who teaches Music grades 3-5 in a district and state that will remain unnamed, uses videotaped material routinely. It’s a pretty poor district, I would be surprised if they paid a fair use payment to every single distributor whose materials they used.
While one might make a case that since the kids’ parents pay taxes, the kids are not truly attending that music class “for free” and so in an indirect manner, monies are being paid and they are sitting and watching the video. A bit of a stretch, no? A video of very high quality such as Beethoven Lives Upstairs looks to have cost at least 5 million to produce. It feels like Prague, but perhaps not. I dunno if any place in Vienna still looks this old. It’s a very high-quality period piece, replete with lots of background extras, busy huge exteriors and lovely art direction. Feels like a feature film.
Having said that, there’s not a lot of market for such a video outside of the music education market. Why not sell it at a slightly higher price than the deep-discounted videos we find at Wal-Mart. ( volume discount indeed… ) Amazon.com shows a DVD of it for $ 21.99 new. So, not so pricey.
AuntiePam, it’s SUCH a fine line. Let’s say you make a moderately popular movie. Soup to nuts, it costs you $ 50 million to shoot, finish, print and distribute. Then you gotta make back your fiddy mil. How? Box office, cable, etc. If the film is not a huge smash, and perhaps doesn’t appeal very broadly, it cannot be pre-sold much if at all. Lower prices won’t produce bigger sales if the product is an unknown. There are exceptions to this rule, but few movies make it big only in post-release video and dvd sales. Lacking good word of mouth, you can discount a dvd heavily and wind up with warehouses full of stock unsold.
Twentieth Century Fox can afford to sell Star Wars III for 19.99 , or 14.99 right off the bat because they know well they will get a certain amount of sales. A feature with more of a niche audience cannot guarantee that. And- and- I’ve always thought that niche audiences are willing to pay a slight premium just because they are so darned glad their fave film is even available and on dvd.
Another price lesson. I shot a feature in 1995. It was released to video, having had nothing of a theatrical life. This happens a lot with lower budget films. ( I think we shot it for 4 million, maybe a smidgen more. Not sure. ). Anyway, when it came out I ran down to Blockbuster. I wanted a copy of MY movie !! The sale price the week it went on sale? 99.99 for a vhs movie. Appalling. They figured, if someone wanted a new release movie that badly, they would pay the price. Within 2 weeks the price dropped below 50.00, and continued to drop until the movie hit the Blockbuster regular price schedule. I think before it was taken off the shelves for lack of sales, it was selling for 24.99. I bought it. 
( Hey man, it was my movie !! )
Returning to the school use issue, I can say that my children’s school district has a large and involved music program. They hold fundraisers to pay for sheet music, because the practice of xeroxing everything you need for orchstra, band, ensemble, general music and so-on came to a grinding halt in our district in the last year or so. Apparently someone dimed them out to a publisher by sending in a large pile of copied copyrighted sheet music. So, a big no-no.
But screeing a video without charging? Naw. The publishers of such videos are likely glad for the exposure. With the Internet, they can now let schools show always without fee, knowing that some kids will see it who otherwise never would have, and a percentage- however small- of that group of kids will want to buy it. Hey, if there are…hmm… 2 million kids between 8 and 10 in the USA in schools? A fair guess, who knows. Let’s say 2 million. Let’s say 500,000 of them see Beethoven Lives Upstairs in music class. 1% is 5,000 sold vhs tapes at 21.99 each. That's 109,950.00 in sales. All for allowing schools to show the video.
If video distributors charged, and prosecuted for screeners who did not pay, the schools ( always broke and underfunded ) would just stop showing that material. Lose the audience, lose that sales potential. It isn’t good business.
And, who can resist looking magnanimous? In the case of the sheet music publishers, I understand and appreciate their concern and due diligence. If people were wholesale pirating the videos, then I’d see the point of charging fair use fees.
Cartooniverse
Appreciate the lessons, everyone. It’s making more sense.
I thought of one final point (okay, three).
First, PBS actually encourages classroom use of its videos. Many of their video offerings are very high-quality productions and are often the best out there. Their primary mission is to educate, after all, and videos are one way to do that.
Second, some classroom videos are just old and not easy to find, particularly at the secondary and college levels. For example, I saw Eisenstein’s “The General Line” in a Soviet history course and have not been able to find a copy of it in any medium. After a time, copyright becomes somewhat murky as the film ages, because people die and companies go out of business. It’s possible to research copyright ownership, but what teacher or school wants to spend the time or money to do that for films that may be shown year after year?
Third, some distributors give a discount for school districts, so they’re not paying full price.
Robin
Why are text books so expensive?
A peeve/suggestion about PBS’ videos: They would probably sell a lot more of them if they made it easier to buy them, no strings attached. A few years ago, I wanted to buy the DVD of one of the “Visions of” series (I think it was Visions of Greece). There seemed to be no way to do this other than to find a PBS station that was currently showing Visions of Greece and pledge to them. My local PBS stations were not showing Visions of Greece then, so I would have had to pledge to some other PBS station if I wanted it. Why couldn’t they just sell it, no pledge required, for 30 (or 50, for that matter) bucks? I suspect I’m not the only one who wants to buy more PBS DVDs but doesn’t want to have to deal with pledging…
I’d also like to know why they cost so much.
The Mechanical Universe is finally available on DVD and I’d love to get a copy of it. The problem is that it costs $450 for the set of twelve DVDs.
Whatever happened to the idea of recording lectures by great professors and making them available to the public via public television?
WAG - is the pledging aspect a way to obtain some kind of tax exemption?
They do. The 12% figure I cited above is for sales without pledging.
If you go to their website, they have a link that leads to their online store. I’m pretty sure I’ve also seen their videos in commercial video stores… look in the documentary section.
Teachers are allowed to show educational videos in classrooms because of the Fair Use clause to US Copyright Laws.
One of the 15 things I learned in college. heh.
What were the other 14 ?
Yeah, I finally did get my “Visions of Greece” on DVD, without pledging. It just took a while for it to be available without pledging. I think they should have offered it as a pledge thank-you and for sale like a normal DVD as soon as it was available.
No, because then there is no incentive for people to pledge. PBS gets almost half of its income from the fees member stations pay for the right to air PBS programming, who, in turn, depend on pledges to pay those fees to PBS. (See the cite I provided upthread. All of their financial information is there.)
It’s like Hollywood… why would you pay $8+ to see a movie once if you can buy the DVD for $20 and have it for all time? PBS member stations want you to pay the $250 (or whatever) to be able to get the “Visions of Greece” DVD. If they did what you suggest, stations would lose out on the $250 and PBS itself would get hurt in the long run because stations wouldn’t be able to afford the programming.
The underlying point is this. PBS, unlike most networks, charges for its programming. If you’re a PBS station, and you want Sesame Street, you have to pay to show it. Conversely, commercial networks pay affiliates to air their programming. PBS derives, as I said, 47% of its revenue from this money. ABC, CBS, and NBC make their money selling commercials. PBS can’t. So they have to get their revenue somewhere.
Which, I’m sure, is way more than you wanted to know about PBS funding.
Robin
Close. They are allowed to show the videos in classrooms because of the face to face teaching exemption.
The concept of Fair Use deals with the ability to make copies of certain items or portions of items under certain circumstances without seeking permission of the copyright holder.
The face-to-face teaching exemption deals with the ability to screen or perform works under certain circumstances without paying for Public Performance Rights.