S2 DVD Sales - U.S.

[A_M_Swallow]

I nominate Andrew for 10 lashes with a wet noodle for gross misuse of the "quote" function.

Message corrected.

I'm sorry, Andrew, but your argument makes no sense.

Warner Bros. was not worried about how well B5 would sell in the U.K., where it had always done very well on VHS. It was worried about how it would do in the U.S. where sales on VHS and LD had suddenly died after a strong start. So why would they opt for a higher prodution run in the country where they didn't think they could sell any discs, and a smaller one in the country where they knew the show was a hit on home video? By your reasoning they must have done this, because there were no reports of the sets selling out suddenly in the U.S. and there were in the U.K.

Possibly they used the high sales in the UK to increase the US production.

Why do you assume that brick and mortar store sales tell us anything about how well the sets sold, or what kind of production runs Warner Bros. did. Again, stores only sell what they order. If the stores have to estimate their needs, they'll take a guess and order that many copies. When they sell those, they'll re-order. But how quickly they'll re-order from either WHV or a distributor will depend on their business. When I worked in a bookstore we liked to consolidate our orders for the same vendor and might not place a non-urgent order for a week or more - in part to take advantage of shipping discounts on larger orders.

Season 1 box sets have not reappeared yet. So either there was no re-order or the shops are still waiting.

www.WHSmiths.co.uk currently has the Season 1 DVD on 3 day availability, which means that they have no copies in their warehouse. Since it is the same organisation this is evidence that one of the biggest DVD distributors in the UK sold out.
http://www.whsmith.co.uk/WHS/Go.asp?isbn=D022855&DB=622

On-line dealers typically deal more in pre-orders than their brick & mortar cousins. So they (and Warner Bros.) have a very accurate barometer to use in estimating their requirements. What you saw in the high street stores tells us absolutely nothing about how the DVDs did in the U.K., how many were produced, or what Warner Bros. sales expectations were.

Regards,

Joe

We do not know what the relationship between online and shop DVD sales are in the UK but I suspect that more get sold in the shops than online. The cheap sell off shops have not been flooded with Season 1 box sets which implies that there have not been a large number of unsold returns. I did not see Season 1 in the monthly 10 ten sales lists published in the newspapers.


Note: Currently in the UK, Season 2 is 8th in the Amazon pre-order list and 19th in all DVD sales. It is for a box set that is not available for 2 more weeks. Season 1 is 145th.

 

[ElScorcho]

yahoo has the s2 boxed set listed at #10...
and the s1 set ranked at #7.