There are three advantages to the consumer in pre-ordering:
1) Some vendors offer additional discounts for pre-orders.
2) You're pretty much assured of getting a hot title on or around the release date - no worry about a store running out of a movie you want. On-line dealers usually reserve copies and ship to their pre-order customers first.
3) Many dealers ship a few days early so that you
get your disc by the release date. This sometimes means you get your order a day or two early and annoy all your friends by commenting on the audio and video quality before they can even buy the disc. /forums/images/icons/smile.gif
(Warning: If you have to be the first one on the block to get something, never pre-order from Amazon. Because they are concerned about breaking street date - and are probably under more scutiny that other on-line retailers - they don't
ship until the official release date, so you won't get it on "the day")
For vendors the benefits are certain sales and a sound basis for estimating the demand for a given title. This lets them order the right quantity of a title from the studio or a distributor. Otherwise they have to pretty much guess, and may be stuck with too many discs or have to back-order a title while they scramble to fill orders.
Will pre-orders help Warner Home Video decide about S2? Oddly enough, they may. I think the studios do monitor things like pre-orders, because they are an early indicator (before the store orders start coming in) of how many copies of a title they might need, and that makes it easier to schedule line time at the production facility.
In Warner's case in particular, I think the pre-orders for the first movie disc moved them to accelerate preparation of the episode discs.
My evidence for this is a small, but telling, fact. On December 4th, the day the TV movie DVD went on sale, JMS posted a usenet message saying that Warner Bros. had started prepping episodes for "the first couple of seasons" for DVD release. This message appeared on the newsgroup around 9 or 10 AM ET, 6 or 7 AM PT. That means Warner Bros. must have made this decision at least a day, maybe more,
before the disc went on sale at retail stores. If it wasn't based on pre-orders and the actual store orders based on them, what was it based on? They couldn't have had any actual sales data at that point.
So if you can pre-order, by all means do so. I'm waiting, myself, much as it kills me. /forums/images/icons/smile.gif Am waiting to hear about a job interview, cleaning up the house so the real estate agent can start showing it next week, and waiting to get a closing date on the condo I'm buying. Too much to do, too little money to commit to the DVDs at the moment.
BTW, for the budget concious, here are two sites,
DVD Planet, and
CD Universe that are carrying the S1 set for $69.99 USD (plus shipping) That beats Amazon.com's 25% discount.
Regards,
Joe
