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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think it’d be necessary to have a completely separate version for a commentary track - it’s just different audio. We were watching Iron Man 3 today on Disney+ so I checked its options, and there are about a dozen different audio languages available. It seems like a simple thing technically to have another “director commentary” audio option.
So my guess is it’s more to do with the rights issues, whether that’s extra cost to the streamer or complications with obtaining the rights themselves.
What is so “fundamentally” different? Streamers already offer content in multiple language options. So you would just tap the “Audio” button in the menu and instead of tapping “Hindi” or “French” or whatever, tap “Director’s Commentary (English).”
Besides rights issues, or financial issues like the studios wanting you to shell out extra cash for special edition Blu-rays, my take is that streaming is seen as too ephemeral. People stream Friends or The Simpsons in the background without paying attention just to have something on like they would with a cable channel. So they will never bother to turn on the commentary for that. Then they binge watch something they do want to watch, but after 10 straight hours of Stranger Things, not many would want to watch it all over again with commentary or even bother come back to it later. And heaven help you if there is separate director, actor, writer, crew, etc commentary. Even for movies. That’s like too much of a good thing.
And now we have an entire generation raised on streaming which has never had much exposure to DVD/BR extras and commentary in the first place. You would buy the DVD/BR with the commentary and extras because that made it “better” than what you could get watching it on cable. There was genuine value added. It was special. But younger people don’t put a value on that the way older viewers do. They have every TV show and every movie ever made (I mean, a lot anyway, let’s not quibble) at their fingertips. A 5 minute behind-the-scenes extra (that has probably already been upped to YouTube) isn’t going to pull them in, so it will be rare that a streamer goes the extra mile to include that sort of stuff.
Interestingly, you can actually watch Project Hail Mary in theaters with a director’s audio commentary track. So there does still seem to be an audience for them.
(And in response to DVD menus being “complicated,” this morning my 4-year old nephew turned on the Blu-Ray player, put in a disc and navigated through the menu to find the episode he wanted to watch.)
I was contemplating the other day how the golden day of DVD extras seemed to be over. Time was a generation ago you’d get not only commentary but a “making of” mini-documentary, the theatrical trailer, a bio and filmography of the proncipals and director and, rarely, a mini-game.
When I bought a copy of Greyhound, albeit from Sri Lanka,* there was naught but the movie on it.
I very often did. Especially in the earlier days of DVDs, when they still felt special and I didn’t have lots of them and I wanted to get the most out of the ones I had.
And what, if any, bonus features were included did indeed sometimes influence my decision whether to purchase a DVD.
Those special features were a way to sell more DVDs (by offering more value to those who bought them). That was the economic incentive to include them. I think the economic incentives are different for streaming services: people subscribe to the service itself rather than purchasing individual movies.
Where did I say it was a pirated copy? The only reason I bought it from Sri Lanka was because two years after its release Apple still had none for sale in the North American market.
Well, you didn’t have to say it because I’m pretty sure it’s not available on disc in any country as an official legal Apple (or Sony I guess) release. So you could have at least supported local North American pirates.
North American Bluray pirates? Because that’s what it is. I fucking looked, surprised there were no UK copies available. There was one available in Japan, with a dubbed soundtrack, and the Sri Lankan copy with an English soundtrack and Sinhala subtitles.
You can be “pretty sure” all you like but it won’t change what was available at the time.
You shouldn’t have been surprised because there is very little Apple TV content authorized for Blu-ray or DVD release.
I have no doubt it was available at the time, but I’m not sure why simply being available is evidence of it being a legit copy. Pirated content is always available, whether it’s being sold out of the trunk of a car or online somewhere. The way you describe it, I can’t tell — did you purchase your copy at an actual store or online?
Sorry, you don’t have to justify yourself. FWIW, I don’t think you meant to purchase a pirated copy, I’m just saying you should be directing your disappointment with the lack of bonus features at the pirates.