<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>I was just wondering whether one of our US brethren could enlighten us as to whether the different treatment of US/UK fans over VHS releases stems from simple incompetence at WHV (not unlikely judging by other posts I have read on the subject) or from some difference in viewer culture that makes a Brit more likely to want to buy the whole run of a series on video.
I suppose it could be because multi-channel TV (and therefore more frequent repeats) is a new phenomenon over here.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
You've answered your own question.
There always
has been a difference in "video culture" between the two countries, and the difference in the availability of multi-channel TV is at the root of it.
Because there were fewer outlets for reruns in the U.K., TV shows often vanished once their original runs finished - sometimes for years at a stretch, sometimes forever. This gave fans in the U.K. an incentive to buy the shows. In the U.S., with its wealth of local and independent channels, most shows that ran at least three years have been re-run
endlessly. If you can watch
M*A*S*H three or four times a day on free TV, why pay for it.
(And TV - barring cable and satellite - always has been
free here. No telly tax, which also plays into the psychology of the thing. People don't like to suddenly pay for something that usually costs them nothing.)
So for years the conventional wisdom in Hollywood - supported by sales figures - has been that TV shows don't sell on home video. At least not in large enough numbers to make them profitable for the studios. (Columbia House carved out a niche for itself offering TV series by subscription, under license from the studios, but they charge more than the studios could get away with.) The only exceptions were "cult" shows like
Star Trek and
The Twilight Zone which had huge fanbases built up over decades.
VHS tapes are also bulky and relatively expensive - not the ideal way to buy a whole TV series, especially a long-running one. (Even Fox issued
The X-Files in partial sets, concentrating on "arc" or "most-requested" episodes, on VHS.)
What the studios are belatedly discovering is that the DVD market is
not the VHS market, and the DVD fans are much more likely to be collectors. And, the TV market has changed considerably since the advent of UPN and The WB. There are fewer independent channels to carry reruns.
The proliferation of cable and satellite channels seems to be having the opposite effect - it is now too
hard to find re-runs of a favorite show in the sea of channels. Finally DVD is inherently more of a collector's medium, and DVD fans tend to be more "purist" than VHS collectors or casual TV viewers. They want
uncut versions of classic shows (which can't be seen on regular TV because the ratio of show to commercial has dropped over the years, and most re-runs have to be trimmed these days.)
Finally, in the specific case of
B5, there is Warner Home Video itself. The company has always seen itself as the video arm of Warner Bros.
Studio. Not only did they believe (with some reason) that "TV shows don't sell", they didn't
want to sell TV shows - they saw (and see) themselves as being in the
movie business and - like many who really
are in the movie business - they look down on television.
So when JMS pestered them about a home video release while the show was in production, they ignored him. At the same time they are territorial, as all Hollywood entities are, so they resisted licensing the show to a third party for a home video release. (Because they might someday change their minds, you see.)
They finally
did license the show to Columbia House (VHS) and Image Entertainment (LD) - and were astonished to see the reaction. That's when they
finally agreed to release commercial tapes of their own. These initially sold well, despite a lack of promotion and a really strange release schedule. The bottom didn't fall out of the VHS market until a WHV executive named Mike Finnegan said, in a published interview, that the studio planned to release
B5 on DVD. (An event that WHV still refuses to admit ever happened, despite the fact that many thousands of people read the interview at the time and the fact that it is still archived on-line.)
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
