</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
Joseph, you're the DVD expert, maybe you can fill in some of my knowledge gaps.
[/quote]
This is actually harder to pin down than you might think. Except for the very top-sellers, the studios are reluctant to discuss specific sales numbers. Even most "best seller" lists only give sales rankings, and sometimes over-all gross sales, but not unit sales.
TV series boxed sets, expensive, and by nature appealing primarily to hard-core fans, almost never top the weekly sales charts, much less the annual reports, which are the only ones I've been able to find with actual unit sales figures. The competition from hot new theatrical releases is simply going to bury TV shows every time in the annual reports, even when they're extremely successful.
But to get an idea of the overall DVD market, here are a few numbers from the Video Business 2002 mid-year sales charts:
The top selling DVD title through June 2002 was The Fast and the Furious which generated over $123 million dollars in sales on a volume of 5.76 million units. The bottom of the list (in 35th place) was Zoolander, which earned $10.7 million dollars on a volume of 500,000 units.
On the week-to-week charts, which don't include unit sales or gross revenues, TV shows generally have been doing better. Video Business publishes a top 15 list. X-Files, Friends and ST:TNG (admittedly all shows with much larger audiences than B5) all landed in the top ten on that list, with TNG placing at number 6 the week it debuted, and X-Files hitting number 8. Friends only made it to number 10 - despite having several times the audience size of the other two shows - an indication that in this arena genre fans may be more likely to plunk down the money to own their favorite series than more mainstream viewers.
The bulk of the sales for these items is probably in the first week or two of the release, even more so than for theatrical films. They tend to appear even higher on dealer's pre-order lists in the months and weeks before street date than many theatrical films that will later eclipse them in total sales. This further reduces their chances of appearing in the annual lists, which reflect total sales over the course of a year. (The Fast and the Furious, for instance, is not only the top-selling title so far in 2002, it was also one of the first major theatrical films released, with a street date of January 2nd.)
Still, even the horrible Zoolander, which debuted in March, managed to sell 500,000 copies by June to take the number 35 place over-all for the year. And I would expect that most of Zoolander's sales came early, from people who loved the film. I don't think it was one of those titles that finds success on video or DVD thanks to word-of-mouth after getting lost in the crowd at the box office. The thing was promoted from Hell to breakfast and managed to take in $45 million at the box office.
Let's say it made sold 300,000 copies in its first week. If the number 35 movie of the year sold 300,000 copies in its first week, how much would the film that placed 6th in any given week sell, on average? That's where the numbers break down. We don't have enough data to really do a comparison. Would 100,000 copies be possible? 200,000?
If TNG could sell 100,000 copies, I think B5 may come in closer to 40,000 or even 50,000. I don't think you're going to see a direct correlation between ratings and DVD sales here. 1) Lots of Trek fans already own all the series on VHS or LD. They've been available for years. 2) From my purely personal observations Trek and even X-Files fans tend to be much less technologically sophisticated than you might think - far less so than B5 fans. I think the typical B5 fan is more likely to own a DVD player - or to buy one to watch this series - than the typical Trek or X-Files fan. If I'm right, that would greatly reduce their apparent advantage in audience size.
And I think a higher percentage of B5 fans are going to want to own all the episodes than is true of either Trek or X-Files. (I know many TNG fans who aren't interested in the first two seasons, because they don't think the show hit its stride until S3, and many X-Files fans who will stop with S5 or S6, because they think the show went down-hill from there.)
But you're right, even with a fairly optimistic estimate of the B5 DVD sales, we aren't looking at numbers that are going to seriously impact ratings, certainly not in the short term.
It is an open question what effect DVD releases of entire TV shows will have on the syndication market in the long run, though, especially if the market continues to fragment into smaller and smaller niche channels reaching ever-more specialized audiences.
Regards,
Joe
