Warner Bros. is not one big corporation, but a loosely knit collection of semi-independent (and often feuding) feifdoms. JMS often complained about how the right hand didn't know what the left was doing over there, and how hard it was to get anything going with a home video release because Warner Home Video, Warner Technical Operations and Warner Bros. Television were never on the same page.
However, it does appear that in the past year or two Warner Home Video, Inc. has been reorganized as a more unified organization. At least the broad decisions on releases in most territories are now made in Burbank, CA. I suspect that Warner Home Video, Ltd. in the U.K. is now a subsidiary of the American company, so the revenues should all flow to the same place, and the costs of things like extras should be spread around.
</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
As to why DVD sales are big in the UK, but sluggish in the US, I coudn't really say.
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DVD sales
aren't sluggish in the U.S. as compared to the U.K. Both in absolute terms (becuase of a much larger population) and in per capita terms DVD is much bigger in the U.S. than it is in either the U.K. or the rest of Europe. I think someone was
projecting that
B5 might not sell as well here on DVD as in the U.K. because of the earlier experience with VHS, and the general difference in the success of TV shows on VHS in the two countries. However, the DVD situation is not at all analogous.
In general:
Until comparatively recently the "secondary market" (independent local broadcast stations and second-run cable/satellite networks) in Britain was much smaller than in the U.S. Between VHS and UHF most TV markets in the U.S. have always been served by between three and six TV stations, of which no more than three were network affiliates. (Many markets, like New York and Los Angeles, had many more stations.) This was
before the advent of cable and satellite. So there were a lot of TV stations with a lot of hours to fill - which they mostly did with reruns of shows that had ended their network runs. Almost every show that last more than four or five seasons on the networks went into reruns for years immediately thereafter. This was not the case in the U.K. because there weren't all those stations hungry for content.
As a result there was a audience willing to pay to own a favorite series on bulky, expensive VHS tapes in the U.K. but there wasn't a similar market in the U.S. We could watch our favorite shows in endless reruns for free. Why buy them, especially on a medium that deteriorated with every play?
Only a handful of TV shows with a strong "cult" following were ever successful on home video in the U.S. prior to the advent of DVD -
Star Trek The Outer Limits and
The Twilight Zone (the originals) - being the prime examples. Even a show like
The X-Files didn't sell well enough to be released in full seasons. Fox only issued a few "best of" collections.
In the specific case of
B5 there were a couple of additional factors that led to the differetial success on VHS:
1) In the U.K. each season was released on VHS not long after it finished airing. In the U.S. the first tapes didn't go on sale until the series was out of production.
2) By the time the U.S. tapes
were released, DVD had arrived. The British release was nearly finished by the time DVD players first went on sale, and were long over before the technology acheived any significant market penetration. A lot of people thought that the series would eventually be released on DVD and looked askance at the belated VHS and laserdisc release. (The LDs arrived a few months after the first tapes.)
3) Less than six months into the VHS release a Warner Bros. exec let slip that preliminary work was being done on a DVD release. VHS and LD sales immediately dried up. By the time it became clear that Warner Bros. had quietly shelved the DVD idea, it was too late, the other releases had been cancelled. (The LD release was almost certainly doomed in any event, since Image Entertainment, which produced the LDs under license, got out of the dying laserdisc business entirely within a year.)
The durable, high-quality and long-lasting DVD format has proven the
perfect way to release TV series on home video. They are cheaper to produce and buy than VHS tapes, more compact to store, and offer far higher quality than even the original broadcasts (unlike the lower quality of commercial VHS tape vis a vis broadcast standard.) With the customary extras, TV shows have proven
enormously successful on DVD in the U.S., a fact which has not been lost on the studios. The pioneer of the full-season set over here was the same
X-Files that couldn't be sold adequately on VHS.
So I expect
B5 to do
at least as well over here, per capita, as it does in the U.K. - especially S2, S3 and S4, which nobody was able to buy on LD or VHS, as people in the U.K. could. And yes, the pre-order numbers will factor into the first week sales figures for the
B5 S1 set in Billboard. They will do so regardless of whether those figures are based on actual retail sales or shipments to retailers. Most DVD retailers promise that the discs will ship by the release date at the latest - meaning they have to order a set for every pre-order. In addition they have to order stock to meet the demand that the official release date and word-of-mouth will bring in later. Brick and mortar retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City, which also have web sites, may use on-line pre-orders to estimate the number of units needed for their stores. So it should all help to give
B5 a pretty good showing for that first week. OTOH, it should be remembered that
The X-Files and
ST:TNG have full-season sets arriving on the same day, and I'm not even sure which hot theatrical titles are also being released on November 5th. (
Spiderman debuts on Friday November 1st, in part to avoid being lost in the usual "release day Tuesday" clutter.) So
B5 S1 could sell fantastically well and still not make the Billboard list, which has only so many slots on it. /forums/images/icons/smile.gif
Regards,
Joe
