Select your own episodes DVD idea (1 Viewer)

[Amy Mormino]

Don't get me wrong, I love DVD Season sets. You can pry my Buffy, Alias, Simpsons, and Futurama sets out of my cold, dead hands. But to me, some shows are not quite worthy of the price of a season set. For instance, I love certain Star Trek: TNG episodes but not enough to shill out the big bucks for a whole season if I just liked three or four episodes. And the Best Of DVDs often don't include my personal favorites.

That got me thinking about an idea for the future. You could (legally, of course) burn your favorite episodes onto a DVD of your own through the internet. The individual episodes could be anywhere from $2 to $4, depending on how expensive the season sets were. The season sets would be cheaper to encourage purchase. An episode of Buffy would be cheaper than an X-Files episode under the system. About four hour-long episodes could fit on one DVD. You could potentially mix and match shows by star or theme, like Halloween episodes or ones with amusing monkeys.

I know its probably not feasible now, but I'm sure something like this could be available in the future. What do you think?

 

[Craig Beam]

Hmmmmm.... I like it. I too wouldn't buy season sets of ST:TNG or The X-files, but there are specific episodes of both series that I absolutely love.

 

[Darren Haycock]

That would be kind of cool. I regularly watched the X-Files, but won't buy the seasons namely because I feel like it completely jumped the shark and didn't pay off in the end, that and the price of the box sets (there's many other series I'd prefer getting instead.) However, there's one episode I absolutely love involving vampires and Mulder and Scully telling their own side of the story. If I could get a legit copy of just that, I'd be happy.

 

[Matt Czyz]

If anyone tried this besides the companies that own the shows, they should prepare themselves for swift and brutal legal action.

 

[Amy Mormino]

Hey, I did say that this should be done legally. I'm not advocating DVD piracy! I think the studios could make a lot of money off of this.

 

[John Watson]

I agree 100%. I'd be prepared to pay premium for a customized DVD. X-Files was one of the series that came to my mind as well.

I would also like a DVD of favorite scenes from different movies. That could be much more difficult to produce - licencing would probably make it a hopeless proposition :frowning:

Another angle is a customized music video DVD - the tracks I want. I proposed this myself some time ago. There is a major dearth of music video compilations. Strange, because (audio only) CD compilations have been common during the life of the CD (since about mid 80's)

It has been possible to order customized cds, but the menu selections were very limited. I used to see ads for the service at CDNow.

 

[David Lambert]

I agree with the idea, too.

Unfortunately, the likely version of this idea that the studios would want to bring out would be a "VOD" version of it, that would use some next-generation version of MacroVision to try to prevent permanent recording of the signal.

The idea would be that you keep "renting" your favorite episodes over and over again. :frowning:


I'd much rather be able to buy it myself at stores on factory-created discs, complete with extras and in a nice package.