Falling towards DVD

This appeared in the Chicago Tribune yesterday:

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>"There is obviously a great market for TV product on DVD in a way that there never was for TV product on VHS," said Peter Staddon, senior vice president of marketing at Fox Home Entertainment. "It seems to be the right format to deliver this property. In DVD, you can get the whole season in a neat little package that takes up two inches of shelf room as opposed to two feet of shelf room for a VHS collection."

"It wasn't that long ago that once a television show played, it went out into the ether and the only way you could retrieve was if you were waiting up on Alpha Centauri and picked it up as it flew by," said Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University and director of its Center on Popular Television.


Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I love that last quote.

You can find the whole article here.

The comments of the VP of Marketing/Special Features for Warner Home Video are especially interesting. Doug Wadleigh is not a name I'm familiar with, so I'm guessing that there has been a shake-up at WHV. (Mike Radiloff had the job as recently as October, according to my notes.)

This may explain their sudden about-face regarding Friends, which will be released in full-season sets (as it was in the U.K.) starting April, instead of the absurd "Best of" sets that they started out with. Tried to get some more information on Wadleigh, but didn't come up with much. He may be the same Doug Wadleigh who was VP of Marketing for Mattel's "Hot Wheels" cars as of 1999. Not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing.

Certainly Wadleigh's statements and the over-all industry trend that this article describes make me much more optimistic that we're going to get a B5 DVD release that is worthy of the series than I have ever been before.

But I'm still waiting for that official announcement. (Are you listening, Antony?)

Regards,

Joe


------------------
Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net

[This message has been edited by Joseph DeMartino (edited January 26, 2002).]

Apparently, The Digital Bits has also heard similar to what B5LR has heard. Check out http://www.thedigitalbits.com/rumormill.html (in fact, they mention this website in the article!)

Anyone else have a good feeling about this?

In a way, having to wait until fall is a good thing. It gives us time to write to WHV and make sure they know exactly what we expect out of this release, and gives them to pull together extras and produce a set that they can be proud to release and we can be proud to own. Tell Warner Home Video what you'd like to see on the B5 DVDs by writing to Doug Wadleigh at the address below. Don't forget to be polite, and thank WHV for releasing the series. But also don't forget to be very clear about what you want on the discs in terms of extras, number of episodes, packaging, etc. I'd already sent a letter to Wadleigh before this latest report appeared. I gave him a list of "must haves" in order of importance, along with some "gee, it would be nice ifs..."

The first thing that I stressed, and I urge anyone who writes to do the same, is that the B5 team - especially JMS - must play a leading role in deciding what goes on the DVDs. The pros at WHV can figure out how to produce the discs, but for this series more than most, the creator and primary writer has to be intimately involved in the production of the discs. It is his story to an extraordinary degree, and the DVDs will be the most permanent form that story is recorded in. (Even when HD-DVD and other formats eventually succeed today's five inch disc, the contents will probably remain the same, for the most part. Also neither JMS nor any of the other folks involved in the show is immortal. If the show is going to be "frozen" in a definitive edition, now is the time to get that done. In ten or fifteen accident or illness may rob us of some of the people who should be involved in such an edition.)

Besides, JMS's involvement is our best assurance that this thing will be done right, and that most of the other things we want to see included will be. (He wants most of them as well, after all.)

Anyway, here's the address:

Mr. Doug Wadleigh
Vice-President, Marketing and Special Features
Warner Home Video
4000 Warner Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91522


Regards,

Joe

------------------
Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net

I am most interested in how many episodes will be on each DVD, or how many it will take for the entire series, including the movies.

------------------
I always seem to be diagonally parked in a parallel universe.

If they are doing boxed sets, as seems likely, there will almost certainly be four episodes per disc. (Except for the last disc in each set which will contain two episodes and - we hope - some extras.)

So that's six discs per season, or thirty discs for the show. If the series is selling well, it would make sense for Warner Bros. to release each movie on its own disc (with some extras) rather than essentially giving one movie away for free, as they did with the double feature "test disc" in the U.S./Canada and Australia/New Zealand. (The Gathering and In the Beginning will be released on separate discs in the U.K. this March. No word on extras as yet.)

If they use the type of packaging pioneered by The X-Files (and soon to be used for ST:TNG), the sets won't take up too much room on the shelf, if that's what you're wondering. My 7-disc X-Files sets fit comfortably in the same space that three or four standard DVDs would occupy.

Regards,

Joe

------------------
Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net

We may suspect that there will be four episodes per disk, which would mean 6 disks per 22 episodes, with space for 2 episodes left over.

But this is only a guess, based on the assumption that they will use single-sided double-layered disks... and that four episodes will be more-or-less equal to "The Gathering" and "In the Beginning".

------------------
"We are the universe, trying to figure itself out.
Unfortunately we as software lack any coherent documentation."
-- Delenn

Whatever way they go its only a matter of time before we get the series on dvd....

------------------
"When it is time, come to this place, call our name, we will be here" -Walkers of Sigma957

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by whitestar90:
Whatever way they go its only a matter of time before we get the series on dvd....
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

oh, way to go whitestar... you've just jinxed the whole bloody thing now!!



------------------

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>But this is only a guess, based on the assumption that they will use single-sided double-layered disks... and that four episodes will be more-or-less equal to "The Gathering" and "In the Beginning".<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

A bit more than a guess, I'd say, and an educated one at the very least. Most studios are releasing TV shows in full-season sets these days, and Warner Bros. has only just announced that it is changing its Friends release from "best of" sets to full-season. There is no reason to suppose that they'd take a different approach with B5, a show for which continuity is much more important.

They specifically did not release B5 as 2-episode discs, as they had originally intended back in 1999, because they saw that Paramount wasn't doing nearly as well as everyone expected with ST:TOS, whereas Fox shocked everyone with the success of X-Files. Now that even Paramount has switched to boxed sets with ST:TNG there is virtually no chance that WB will do anything different with B5.

Similarly there is no reason for them not to follow the successful formula of putting four episodes on one side of a dual-layered disc. This is what fans prefer (since they don't have to flip the disc over part-way through.) "Flippers" with different content on each side are becoming increasingly rare in the DVD world, and don't save that much in terms of production cost. Fox refuses to produce such discs (and especially rejects DVD-18, dual-sided, dual-layer, which are much more expensive) purely from a marketing and customer preference perspective.

It made sense to make the first movie disc a dual-sided, single-layer job, because they wanted to keep the costs down to an absolute minimum. Now that they have an idea of how many copies of the season sets they can expect to sell, they can easily "price-in" the (marginal) additional cost of doing dual-layered discs. This approach also allows them to put silk-screened artwork on each disc, which not only makes it easier to keep the discs straight, but adds to their "collectible" appeal.

We already know that four episodes of the series are approximately equal to two TV movies, because they all use the same formula: there are approximately fifteen minutes of commercial time per hour of air time on contemporary American television. So a "one hour" show will be around 45 mintues and a "two hour" movie will be about 90 minutes. Two episodes equal one movie.

So while we may still be waiting for official word from Warner Bros., there are enough facts in evidence for a reasonable projection of what the studio is likely to do, one that is more than a guess based on rumor.

Regards,

Joe

------------------
Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net

Well hopefully when that they put 4 episodes on a disc, and extras on disc 6 for each season.

And that they use the roll out case type, (Like the X-Files).

If they do something like that, then the space on your shelf, is about as wide as 2 video tapes.

So if they have 5 Season Discs, and Movie Disc. (for Third Space, River of Souls and Call to Arms, on a disc, plus the disc already out, then your talking the space of about 11 VHS tapes, for the whole series,

Plus hopefully there will be a 3 disc Crusade set (5 episodes on disc 3). or on 4 discs, with lots of extras.

------------------
"Let's split up"
"Good Idea"
"Yea we can do more damage that way."

while we are hoping and dreaming

why not a dvd for lotr too?
and extras including JMS doing his little tale of a king and court in a far off land that commisioned great songs...

CR

------------------