An open letter to Sony (2 Viewers)

[Jay_B!]

well, Seinfeld also had television commercials and the cast reuniting for an Oprah appearence, and the sets were loaded with extras, etc... Which I think all in all probably cost at least twelve times as much money as it did for Who's The Boss, which was an 80's sitcom that probably doesn't have that large of a draw outside of hardcore Alyssa Milano fans and people who grew up with the show in the 80's.

There is no reason why the two shows should even be compared. Shows like Seinfeld, Friends and The Simpsons shouldn't be viewed as the standard to hold all shows up to, but instead viewed as fluke shows. It's like Fox refusing to release movies on DVD that don't sell in the same league as Star Wars... Star Wars is an exception to the rule.

 

[Mark Talmadge]

In regards to the All in the Family series, Sony releases one set per year:

All in the Family Season 6: February 13, 2007
All in the Family Season 5: January 3, 2006
All in the Family Season 4: April 12, 2005
All in the Family Season 3: July 20, 2004
All in the Family Season 2: February 4, 2003
All in the Family Season 1: March 26, 2002

Like I said, good luck trying to convince Sony. If you have a couple of billion dollars to pay Sony to release all of their sets with no regard for loss of profit ... go right ahead.

Oh, and by the way, Baywatch has a much larger fanbase than a mediocre series like Cybil has. What you describe the two series as, is like comparing the fanbase of Star Trek to Barner Miller. One far outweighs the other.

 

[MatthewA]

I couldn't care less whether or not the studios have a good business plan, whereas even a novice like me can see that they're being penny-wise and pound foolish. They need to at least take a chance on promotion and putting the basic care into the releases and come up with a release strategy not based on a one-size-fits-all mode.

The article Jay mentioned is interesting. There was another article from Variety that someone else mentioned in the "Maude" thread with a Sony spokesman saying something to the effect that fans should basically take first seasons and be happy with them. There was also another article several years ago with some other Sony spokesman saying "who needs more than one season of Sanford and Son?" And this was about what was apparently one of their better-selling shows.

Does anyone but Paramount spend a dime advertising any pre-1990s shows? Sony had the Facts of Life cast on the Today show mentioning their show is out on DVD. Sales were very good, so season 3 came out. Did they do any follow-up ads? Nope.

Valerie Bertinelli has a book out, but does it mention that One Day at a Time, the show that made her famous, is available on DVD? I couldn't find it. There was a coupon for Jenny Craig, though.

Paramount's TV library now lies with CBS Corporation, even though both they and Viacom are owned by National Amusements. CBS makes the DVDs and Paramount releases them. CBS appears to be a much leaner organization. They pay for remastering (Dynasty looked almost like HD), but they don't clear music rights (apparently they do in the UK, as Happy Days S2 in Region 2 has music not cleared for the US release). They are releasing seldom seen shows and they're apparently not losing their shirts.

Many of these studios' overheads are bloated. To remaster a TV episode at Warner Bros.' in-house telecine costs $5000 per episode. PER EPISODE. Universal is even worse. Now they are being sued by Jack Klugman who says they cheated him on "Quincy" profits. I sincerely hope he wins his suit.

And the music licensing regulation needs to be changed. It just does not work.

Sony's decisions with movie DVDs are often even more infuriating. I don't want to have to remind you all of that pan-and-scan DTS DVD about that musical about a little orphan girl again, or the pan-and-scan DVD of that movie about that little girl from the Roald Dahl book who does magic, or the WS/P&S combos being released as P&S only, or the fact that they finally do restored, chronological Three Stooges sets and do no advertising for it, and claim they sold only 12,000 copies. And they claim Lawrence of Arabia won't sell on Blu-Ray based on what Close Encounters of the Third Kind did, yet they release a less popular film from the same director!

 

[MatthewA]

Do you seriously believe that a studio going into its back catalogue and looking at how to release it properly would cost anywhere near a billion dollars?

Baywatch is nowhere in the same league as Star Trek. For Star Trek, Paramount went all out with the releases. Baywatch was farted out by a Mickey Mouse company like First Look and fans responded to the treatment accordingly.

 

[Jay_B!]

Baywatch has always been a guilty pleasure show, nothing more, nothing less. People drooling over hot women running around in bikinis. Christine Baranski won an Emmy for her role on Cybill and the series also won Golden Globes and SAG awards. Baywatch never even had nominations. If you can complain that your favorite jigglefest show has been abandoned on DVD, I can complain that a huge company has all but abandoned the TV-DVD format in favor of BluRay, leaving dozens of beloved shows in the air, leaving fans to go the bootleg route as the only way to finish them.

 

[Walter C]

Looking from the business side of things...

Let's say that Sony listens to the fans, and releases the next season of The Facts of Life. But sales end up being poor once again. Not only do they lose money, but also the people involved will lose their jobs. Remember, they have stockholders to answer to.

 

[Jay_B!]

the first Facts Of Life set was apparently very successful, season 3 didn't have half the promotion the first set had. I'm sure it didn't do THAT bad anyways, the first set did very well and exceeded expectations.

What I dislike is that Sony gets mad at complete episodes of shows like Maude and Strokes and Facts on YouTube on seasons not made available. They want to shove this minisode crap down our throat over the 70's and 80's sitcoms (which IMO is making a mockery of the shows we grew up on, we don't like syndicated edits, why would we like 5 minute versions?), but yet they don't want the fans to watch episodes for free on YouTube that they won't bother putting on the shelf for the fans to buy or aren't necessarily seen widely in syndication anymore. If you want people to cease and desist having episodes of these shows on YouTube, then DO THE RIGHT THING and legally make them available to us instead of making us go the bootleg route.

 

[Mark Talmadge]

The one thing that Sony isn't going to listen to is everyone pointing accusatory fingers at Sony or any other company and telling them to release the shows or stop complaining about them being on YouTube. You won't get any response.

Sure, it's frustrating that studios don't release these sets in a timely manner or as frequently as "WE" want them to but "WE" don't run these companies. The CEO's, the Board of Directors, the Stockholders, they are the driving forces behind these companies and studios and they all have people to answer to.

These studios are not going to back a losing horse. Also, with the way the economy is, of course there's going to be a slowdown in the production of new sets for your favourite television shows. There always are production slowdowns this time of the year. It's economics.

Just look at shows like Barner Miller and Seaquest and Sliders, all of which had more than 6 or 9 months between season releases. Television shows on DVD had started out as a lucrative business but as more and more shows flooded the market and studios concentrating their efforts on releasing DVD sets for shows that are currently in production, they are going to release the newer shows to use as a promotional tool for the new seasons/episodes.

Older shows are already completed and thus don't have a means of promoting the shows. There's a limited field there. Studios aren't in a rush to release older shows and oftentimes only release a small handful of completed shows during a certain timeframe.

 

[Thaellar]

Forget about swaying the DVD division of Sony. They won't care. But the corporate umbrella may care if they get letters saying that consumers won't be buying Sony TVs, DVD players, cameras and computers because of poor customer relations at one of their divisions.

 

[Corey3rd]

Valerie is now making major dollars from Jenny Craig as their spokesmodel. Of course they're going to do a deal with her book. It only makes. But how much money can she be earning off the One Day at a Time DVD?

The UK version of Happy Days probably has the extra songs because they didn't have to pay the same rate that the US publishing houses wanted for those songs.

Sony has always been screwed up when it comes to DVDs. We must always remember how they lost MGM to Fox because they were so lame. And they don't seem to be trying to do harder to rid themselves of this reputation.

 

[MatthewA]

Valerie probably won't make a dime from the DVDs even if everyone who ever watched the show bought it, because it is highly unlikely that Norman Lear, who was liberal with everything except money, would have foreseen DVD or any form of home video afterlife for TV shows in 1975 when they drew up the actors' contracts. Thus compensation for a non-existent medium would not have been included when she signed on.

It was four years between seasons 1 and 2 of Barney Miller. And they did such a lousy job with the first season that I have yet to purchase it.

And then there was Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. They left out a whole freaking plot point! These are not competent people who care about the product they put out.

If they can't sell a product that has a considerable customer base, they should be fired and never be allowed to obtain employment in this business again.

You want to talk Sony's mockery of their back catalog I've got three words for you: The Rerun Show. There's more to this than meets the eye, but what?

 

[Jay_B!]

Sony has been slow for almost an entire year. They were going fairly smoothly in early 2007 with Maude, ODAAT, Jeffersons, All In The Family, Jeannie, Mad About You, Bewitched and several other sets, and then suddenly around June, it pretty much came to an abrupt stop, and it has been slim pickings ever since. Even last Christmas, the only sets we received during that period were the final seasons of Seinfeld and King Of Queens (and the complete series sets), compared to 2-3 years ago when they would've had at least 6 or 7 releases in a short amount of time.

 

[MatthewA]

Perhaps that's part of the problem. All the studios saw potential, but they hoped to get the most bang for the least buck, and flooded the market. They threw dozens of shows to the wall to see which ones would stick.

 

[Jay_B!]

that is true, but it seems like for the most part, Paramount has done a good job keeping up. Taxi's the only show I can think of that has really seemed to be "abandoned", and knowing them, I wouldn't put it past them to sneak season 4 on the radar sometime in the fall. I don't see why Paramount can stay on top of things for the most part and keep sets coming at a reasonable pace yet Warner, Sony, Fox, Universal and the like can't and won't. I guess Paramount "lucked out" in the sense that they don't have one bonafide blockbuster seller that towers over the rest of the catalog (ala Friends, Seinfeld, Family Guy, Simpsons, Sopranos, Sex And The City, Lost, etc....). I know of South Park and Chappelle's Show, but both of those sets come from the Comedy Central division (even the artwork for the SP sets never have CBS on it and are still in digipacks instead of switched to the amaray cases) instead of pure CBS/Paramount. If Paramount can stick with shows like Hawaii Five-O, Family Ties and others that haven't been standard tv fixtures in eons and can see the shows profitable enough to continue on with, I don't see why Sony or Warner or Fox can't with their second-tier shows? (first-tier for Sony would probably be Seinfeld, King Of Queens and maybe shows like Married With Children and Bewitched)

 

[Mark Talmadge]

Ain't going to work. Shareholders, CEO's and Board of Directors are only swayed by one thing, Profits. The only question they ask is "are we making money?" You're going to have a tough time convincing a lot of people to boycott a company such as Sony. It won't work.

As far as the TV Shows on DVD phenomenon goes, yeah, studios messed up. They released too much crap at one time and thought that consumers would buy into it. The problem is? The plan backfired. With the economic problems that the United States has been going through, consumers just didn't have the money to spend on DVD's especially with the cost of gas and food going up through the ceiling.

Even Sony has stopped releasing new sets because they want to see if the previous releases are selling. However, stores aren't stocking older sets and the only place you can order them is through online orders or by mail order. And, even that won't work because many stores such as Borders, Best Buy, Circuit City, Barnes and Noble have started listed many of these sets as being discontinued by their distributors.

Best Buy has been notorious for removing older sets from its online store and so has Borders, for that matter. Target.com gets its stock furnished by Amazon.com and so does Borders.com for that matter. Borders online ordering store for pickup in stores bordersstores.com often lists many sets as no longer available.

Everyone can continue to moan and complain about it, but the reality of it is that nobody is buying. It's also the fault of many here who moan and complain that they aren't getting what they want because everyone acts like crybabies and that doesn't work either.

Plus, give in to the fact that there are millions upon millions upon millions of consumers who don't like ordering online because they do not trust their credit cards or whatnot to online ordering. I'm one of them ... most will walk into the store and if that store doesn not stock that set, they'll walk out of the store. Forget asking to order the item because, with the exception or Barnes and Borders, of which they charge full retail, often won't order the product to restock in their store.

 

[Bryan^H]

So someone explain to me Sony's Fantasy Island season 2. Over a year after the season 1 release, the insert cards you get with other Sony tv dvds listed one of the "coming soon" releases was Fantasy Island season 2.

So, the first season must have done well, because they obviously planned the season 2 release, and then......nothing. That was almost 2 years ago.

Being a fan of that show, BS like this is just cruel, and wrong on many levels!

 

[Corey3rd]

Now that I'm watching the Love Boat DVDs, I need that chaser of Fantasy Island to get my ABC Saturday night buzz.

A lot of the Sony shows that I'm hoping to watch were shot on video so its not like Sony will make a killing issuing these shows on Blu-Ray - unless they'll just pack all the episodes on a single Blu-Ray disc in DV. This would probably be the best solution for Mary Hartman.

 

[David Levine]

Except they wouldn't sell very many copies. IMO, the fan of Mary Hartman is (in general) not an early adopter of Blu-Ray.

 

[MatthewA]

Mark,

I don't begrudge your anger for First Look's deplorable releases of Baywatch. Do you have any serious suggestions to make on how to make a bad situation better?

 

[Jay_B!]

well, honestly... what I am curious about and nobody seems to know the answer is why Paramount seems to make profits off all of these "second-tier" programs from 20, 30, 40 years ago and see fit to release subsequent seasons in a timely manner, while Sony, Fox and Warner are so much more selective with what shows they continue releasing. Is Paramount really making that much more of a profit or do they just have more realistic expectations with their catalog instead of holding them to the Seinfeld/Friends gold standard?