Raising Awareness of Syndication Cuts (1 Viewer)

[Jaime_Weinman]

I find it a bit irritating that articles on TV on DVD rarely mention the biggest advantage of TV on DVD: uncut episodes. In fact, most articles about the TV-DVD phenomenon say something like "why are people paying to get episodes they can see for free in syndication?" and then fail to recognize the best reason for buying a TV show -- there's no other source for uncut TV after the first broadcast run. Many movies, after all, can be found uncut on cable; but even cable channels devoted to old TV shows tend to chop them up (which just shows how little respect television programming gets, compared to movies). Many people, it seems, aren't even aware of how badly shows (especially older shows) are cut in syndication, and when they understand what they're missing, that's a big incentive to buy the DVD.

I remember that a couple of years ago, after the first season of M*A*S*H was announced for DVD release, I was discussing it with a couple of people I met in a TV memorabilia store (not that I... bought anything). They said, basically, why would anyone pay to see a show that's in syndication every day? I pointed out that at least three minutes are cut out of every syndicated airing, to which they replied: "Well, the stuff they cut out can't be very good, can it?" TV don't get no respect...

 

[Vincent Matis]

Many people don't care if they lose 33% of the picture (P&S), so I guess they couldn't care less about 2min of cuts in TV show...

 

[Steve Meil]

I thought I would have to reply. Someone told me that I should buy a DVD recorder, that I would eventualy save money recording off television. What about all those iritating station logo's, the constant on screen promos and consider the fact that the cable does not come in in a quality that you would want to save.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Yeah simply the reason why my Sony recorder does not see much Series action, I'd rather get them sans bugs, squashes, etc.

 

[JeanSSullivan]

+ the quality here is very very crappy. Fox got an static bar going from top to botttom... even in Digital + the huge amount of mpeg compression going on and they're not even in widescreen.. Were i live, may not be the case for everyone

But HDTV shows are nice to see on tv because some are 1080i and it's very nice, but for 480i/p stuff buying the sets is better

 

[Robert Ringwald]

Most people honestly don't regard TV as highly as movies. Some people fail to realize even the basic things... for example, a TV show can have much better acting or be more emotionally grabbing compared to many movies...

So mentioning that 2 minutes is cut is nothing to them...

 

[ChrisRose]

I hate syndication cuts... I don't get how it doesn't bother some people. I can only assume they're not huuuuge fans of the series in question.

I remember watching Family Ties in syndication on VisionTV, and despite the fact that I hadn't seen the eps for 15+ years, I noticed when something was missing... even just a few lines of dialogue to shorten a scene. So much for taping the series off TV in case it's never released on DVD! :frowning: