Why Does Streaming video throw away Commentaries and other Goodies?

Cafe Society
1

I always enjoyed DVD commentaries with the director and cast.

Splash 20th Anniversary for example featured Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, other cast commentary. A making of feature and other goodies.

I had to rent or purchase Splash on Prime. It’s not on the regular streaming services that I use. (Peacock, Max, and Paramount +)

I purchased the film, but feel short changed. All I got was the movie.

Why Does Streaming video throw away Commentary?

Why does leaving DVD’s require us to regress and loose all the extras?

DVD rips have included a commentary track since the late 90’s. VLC lets me select the commentary audio or just the movie audio.

Yet, streaming won’t do the same?

2

Streaming networks probably don’t have the rights to the additional content.

3

If they don’t have the additional content rights it’s only because they didn’t buy them. Which just moves the question to “Why do streaming services not want to buy the additional content rights and show the additional content?”

IANA expert. I have never watched the additional content on any DVD. I find the process of guessing how to operate their “artistic” menus to navigate past that crap to get to the real show to be nothing but an irritant. I suspect users like me outnumber users like the OP maybe 10 or 20 to 1.

If they did want to offer the additional content it almost would have to be as a separate show you could pick from their menu of available shows. The streaming interface has nothing that corresponds to the content menu of a DVD. Which raises a lot of potential for audience confusion about which additional content goes with which underlying movie, series, or episode.

There is always a problem with arguing “supply and demand” or “the marketplace has spoken” whenever no supplier is selling whatever the customer wants to buy. So customers individually and collectively have no way to communicate their frustrated demand to the would-be sellers.

Maybe the OP can recruit like-minded folks on social media to start a pressure campaign for some streaming outlet somewhere to start buying and showing additional content.

4

Not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. DVD publishers might withhold those rights for any number of reasons. The content may have been provided by third parties, under different contracts. The streaming distributor may not have those rights to offer.

5

There’s two parties involved. We also need to ask “why do rights holders not want to sell additional content to streaming services?”

I’m guessing it’s a failure to come to a price satisfactory to both parties. The streaming service doesn’t want to increase fees too much. And the rights holder doesn’t want to reduce the value of Blu-ray offerings too much.

6

The Special Anniversary editions makes buying a blu-ray or dvd more appealing.

I still buy a few. I have the Evil Dead dvd because it has excellent commentary.

The majority of my movies now are on Prime.

I may buy Splash on dvd for the commentary. This was an early project for Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. Their recollections of production would be very interesting.

I haven’t purchased any blu-ray. I don’t want a HDMI connection and copyright restrictions.

7

Regardless of whether “the streaming service didn’t care to buy rights to the commentary track,” or “the rights owners didn’t want to sell it,” I think the above is a big part of it. For a streaming service to offer the commentary track to a movie, they’d fundamentally have to offer two different, separate versions of the movie:

  • No commentary version
  • Commentary version

I also suspect that only a small proportion of DVD/Blu-Ray buyers/owners ever watched/listened to the commentaries (or other bonus features like “making of,” bloopers, etc.). Even if a streaming service could offer it, they’d need to buy the rights to run a separate version of the movie which, I am guessing, pretty few people would actually watch. It might not be worth it for them.