Re: What Happened To the Classic Shows on DVD?
Quote:
| So...the industry needs to get over these dumb season sets and just move on Complete Series sets. |
The thing that people who write things like this don't understand is that it
costs money to digitize and master all those episodes, and more money to create the menus do all the other programming that goes into each disc. There is a mistaken belief that the only cost to the studios in releasing a show is producing, packaging and distributing the discs. In fact, disc replication is one of the
cheapest items involved in the process. It is everything involved in producing the
contents of the disc that cost the big bucks. And the fact that the bare episodes already exists does not diminish all the expenses incurred in putting those bare episodes onto a DVD master.
The studios didn't just arbitrarily "decide" to do season sets instead of complete series for no reason. In fact, they
resisted even donig season sets. They wanted to gradually release series on 2-episode discs (the Paramount model with
ST:TOS) or release "Best of" collections. (Which is how Warner Bros. first dipped a reluctant toe into the TV-on-DVD waters.) It wasn't until Fox succeeded with full-season sets of
The X-Files (which most industry types regarded as a horrible risk and likely failure) that things began to change. And Fox was taking a chance: They were spending all the money up front to process all those episodes and then
hoping there would be a big enough audience for the fairly pricey sets that resulted.
ST:TOS S1 would cost more to purchase in the long run (at $15.00 per 2-episode disc), but since people were paying for it gradually, over time, it wasn't as
noticeable.
Fox's gamble paid off, but as season sets became the norm, the studios noticed something: Sales for subsequent seasons tended to be about the same as sales for the first season. So if the first season of a show flopped, there was no reason to think the later seasons would do better. Therefore the prudent thing was to stop producing that show.
Quote:
| What I find interesting is that in the DVD era, these old shows have to prove themselves all over again or risk "cancellation" just as they did first run. |
Exactly, and for most of the same reasons. And just as we "risk" having our time wasted if we start watching a show (because it may get cancelled after a short run) so we "risk" having a show orphaned on DVD.
But I don't hear too many people saying that the networks and studios should only air shows that they've agreed in advance to run for at least five years, and that are paid for up front and cannot be cancelled even if their ratings suck. Does anybody think that would be a
rational way to run a network? Let's say a modest network show has an average per episode budget of $4 million. At 22 episodes per year that's $88 million a season and $440 million for a 5 year run. Would it make sense for ABC to spend $440 million
this year for a show that they're stuck with for five years whose ratings may earn them only $3 million per episode in 5 months?
So why should a studio do the equivalent for a TV on DVD release? Why would they pay
all the upfront costs (which can also run to millions of dollars per TV season) for 5 or 7 or 10 seasons of a show
before seeing the first dime of profit or the first sales number from the first season? Don't forget, one of the advantages of the season-by-season approach is that it creates cash-flow, you can pay your production costs on subsequent seasons out of the money you're earning on the early ones. Pay for everything up front and you don't turn a profit until possibly years in the future. (Because most people are still going to collect one season of your show at a time, no matter how quickly you release it, because most of them can't afford to drop a couple of hundred dollars on a "full series set")
The only show that ever pulled off anything resembling this in the U.S. market was
Star Trek in its various incarnations. And even then Paramount released each series one season at a time, about once each month. It is true that they basically did all the mastering up front, which is how they were able to meet that release schedule, but they recouped the costs very quickly by getting each series out in about six months (as opposed to the two plus years it took Warner Bros. to release
Babylon 5.) But
Trek has always been an exception in American television. It was one of the very few non-kids' shows that managed a complete series release in a retail
VHS version (the others were
Twilight Zone and
The Outer Limits - even
The X-Files only managed some "Best of" collections.) At a time when the rule was "TV doesn't sell on home video",
Trek did. The
Trek franchise is like a license to print money, and
Trek fans will buy anything with a Starfleet "swoosh" on it. Paramount knew going in that they were going to make their money back. They weren't taking any risk at all.
And they're the only ones in the history of TV-on-DVD who have been in that position. Everybody else has to be prudent, and take a sensible and responsible approach to relasing TV material. Which does
not including paying 90% of the cost of releasing a full season before you have any idea how it will sell. I'm sorry, but it just doesn't.
Regards,
Joe
