I understand if they stopped printing new blu rays / DVDs, but it’s outrageous and disappointing I can’t just buy the digital edition.
Is there an actual reason companies do this? Do they hate money or what?
🏴☠️ 🦜
Printing physical media and distributing it is a huge cost, since physical media use has declined in recet times the supplychains they used to rely has gone.
This has increased the cost.
Compare that to digital infrastructure and you have a cheaper alternative that has scalable solutions.
There is no need to print or really distribute physical media any more, you get the finnished movie/episode as a digital file, you upload it to the cloud shortly before release, wait for it to automagically get cached in the regions, and set the timer for release. The streaming service will automatically change the $video.enabled variable from $false to $true, and millions of people will be able to watch it at the same time.
Just pirate everything until they get their act together.
It takes more than zero dollars to prepare media for a new format, like streaming.
Many old series did not have contracts that covered streaming, since it didn’t really exist at the time.
Many old series had music licensed for a specific format, and they would need to renegotiate those contracts for the new medium.
That is why some series have made it to streaming but with replacement music or are only available to buy but not be included in netflix or hulu as part of a subscription. Others haven’t made it because the company either thinks they won’t make their money back or they are working on something that they expect will make more money first.
No I’m not saying streaming but buying it
(This is more for OP and other readers than the author of the comment I’m replying to)
A classic example being WKRP in Cincinnati which was a relatively low budget sitcom when it was produced. It was shot on videotape instead of film and took advantage of a special licensing rate for music when added to videotaped programs, which let them include a lot more contemporary rock music that would’ve aired on a rock station in the late ’70s. However, the licenses had a limited time allowance so while the show was originally in syndication with that music, by the ’90s it was replaced with similar sounding stock music. Early releases of the show for home media also didn’t have the original songs. Shout Factory put together a box set of the show and went back to the music owners to try to form new licensing deals, but even they couldn’t clear every song.
Music isn’t the only factor; similar issues pop up with all sorts of rights issues and royalties. When shows were made in the ’50s no one really had the idea of reruns and syndication. Before the ’80s there was no real idea of home viewing, and even then in the days of VHS tapes the idea of putting an entire show on tape for home use was pretty out there. Only fitting 1-4 episodes on a tape meant a season alone might take up a whole bookshelf, never mind a full series. It really wasn’t until the 2000s that there was a normal expectation that a show for broadcast would also go into syndication and be sold/rented to home viewers. So a lot of contracts with actors, writers, directors, etc. didn’t cover how royalties would be paid on these newer releases. Sometimes those rights have been sold in the interim as well, so it requires a legal team researching what rights need to be secured and who currently owns them to make sure all the payments are planned. Get it wrong and a rights-holder can sue and might end up taking away all your profit, even making the venture lose money. If you’re going to release an old show, you need to be confident that there’s enough of an audience willing to pay that you can cover all those costs and still make a profit, not to mention the costs of preparing the program to a format suitable for sale/streaming.
Of course, once those copyrights expire, some of those cost concerns go away. We’re only just starting to reach that point with films (anybody want to watch Steamboat Willie?), so in another 30 years or so we’ll probably start seeing more old TV shows. If they’ve survived, of course.
This was an excellent example!
Beavis and Butthead is another similar example. Some group of people have done their best to recreate it digitally in a torrent called the King Turd edition.
It’s simple. Big companies really hate us.
Disney used to do that a lot, ‘get it now before it goes back into the vault’ in some effort to make it special/get-it-while-you-can.
Having everything available all the time would leave them with little to put on a pedestal as a coming soon limited time thing. Just one person’s theory though.
I mean, can you give an example or two?
There’s probably not a single answer for everything. Depending on what you consider “old” there’s a chance no one saved a copy.
It might be that contracts were better back then so the studio wouldn’t make much releasing it.
Chuck, for example. It’s available in the US afaik but where I live, it’s available only in streaming on prime video. The blu rays aren’t available at all either
So it’s a region locking thing.
That sucks for everyone. I remember back in the day when vpns got new regions, and there was so much more available.
But physical media needs to be physically produced. It’s available in DVD and I think it came before Blu-ray even so you’re kind of asking a lot here
