Universal/NBC has a lousy infrastructure

Michael Alden · 01-30-2007, 08:53 PM

A source in the industry has confirmed something that I had heard previously. Universal's in-house transfer costs are so outrageous that it makes it near impossible for them to make any profit on all but the highest selling sets. Get this, a single episode transfer from film costs them $5000. That means a single season series with 26 episodes costs them $130,000 right off the bat. Before DVD authoring, packaging, etc. At those prices it's no wonder they are the kings of one and done. With that type of idiotic setup they probably have to sell 50,000 sets just to break even. So when people ask why such and such isn't coming out, take a look at how the studios structure their setups and that will give you a good indication. And it's unconfirmed but I believe Warner has a similar screwy setup although the price I hear they have is even higher ($7000 an episode). That's why anything even close to being considered borderline will never see the light of day from those 2 companies.

MatthewA · 01-30-2007, 09:41 PM

Warner charges $7000 for one episode? No wonder they use off-the-shelf tapes for "Dallas." Remastering alone of the entire series would cost $2,499,000. (That price times 357 episodes)

What does it cost with videotaped shows since they can't really be "remastered" the way film can be?

Derek Miner · 01-30-2007, 10:59 PM

I have heard from people who work in broadcasting mention that costs for obtaining tapes of Warner Bros. catalog series and movies are high, and even higher if you need an edited or captioned version. They also supposedly store their masters in an underground vault in the midwest, so if you need something from them, the tape needs to get to their LA people before it can get to you. I've also heard some bad things about the delivered masters of Warner properties. QC from their subcontracted dub houses is poor or non-existent.

Steve...O · 02-03-2007, 07:35 PM

Incredible. Thanks for sharing. That does explain a lot. One wonders if this $5,000 is the actual incremental cost or if it is fully loaded with overhead attached. If this is just incremental the fully loaded cost would be even more astronomical which means that a huge number of units would need to be sold just to break even. Does the $5,000 include restoration costs?

If the studio's cut is $5 to $7 per box set (I don't know if this is anywhere near accurate but I suspect consumers would be surprised how low the number is) then they would need to sell more than 30k units to break even on a vintage show with 30 - 39 episodes per season. That's a lot of units for a show that probably has a limited fan base.

David_Blackwell · 02-03-2007, 10:49 PM

No wonder they don't like to use some songs and sub another one. But sometimes it is good to just see some of these shows see the light of day on DVD. Still with the costs, they do look to make money on them. Money drives many of these releases period.

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chas speed · 02-03-2007, 11:01 PM

Universal is pretty famous for not bothering to remaster any of their tv shows for dvd, so your quotes are pretty insane. A lot of their older tv shows were remastered 20 or 30 years ago so they still look better then some studios. Look at their Night Gallery season one dvd release. They didn't spend a dime on the transfers and sold the set, that only incuded 6 episodes and the pilot for 60 dollars. My heart bleeds for this "poor studio".

MatthewA · 02-04-2007, 12:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chas speed

Universal is pretty famous for not bothering to remaster any of their tv shows for dvd, so your quotes are pretty insane. A lot of their older tv shows were remastered 20 or 30 years ago so they still look better then some studios. Look at their Night Gallery season one dvd release. They didn't spend a dime on the transfers and sold the set, that only incuded 6 episodes and the pilot for 60 dollars. My heart bleeds for this "poor studio".

This explains why we won't see season 2 for awhile, if ever.

Derek Miner · 02-04-2007, 12:49 AM

As far as broadcast outlets go, Universal has been better in many respects than Warner Bros.

Will_C · 02-04-2007, 12:40 PM

Well, they've announced Airwolf season 3 coming out in May so I'm pretty happy with Universal right now. I don't know the sales figures, but I heard that season 1 didn't sell as much and they'd hoped. It took 1.5 years, but we just got season 2 at Christmas and now an announcement for season 3 in a few months. I don't know how it will look, but I'm happy with the appearance of the first two sets on an older, 4:3 analog television. Might change my mind when I play them on a modern HDTV. But I just can't be mad at Universal right now since they listened to a number of us here at HTF and stopped putting out those damned defective double sided discs and went back to single sided dvds. At least I like to tell myself that we here were at least partly responsible for their change. I freely admit I don't know about studio overhead when it comes to producing tv on dvd sets, I'm just honestly glad to get shows that I enjoyed at better than Star Trek set prices. Not knocking Paramount, but since I've purchased all the ST sets, I'm glad that most everything else is half price or less.