Informal poll:
Every time I see a TV show being released on DVD that I want, I find myself put off by the price, and have not, to date, bought a single one. Seems like everything out there is priced at $40-50 per one or two season set.
I realize they are approaching this from the "hours of material" pricing model, and since you are typically getting 10x or more material time-wise, compared to a motion picture, this seems a logical price point, given that movies go for $15-20.
However, my emotional response prevents me from framing it in these terms. This is usually material I've already seen, it lacks the production value of a film (on average), was FREE (discounting buying a TV and cable/satellite costs) when first viewed. It's also probably that I am less likely to fire up the FP for something like this, so it sure doesn't feel as valuable.
What brought this home was noticing that the first 3 years of Scooby-doo cartoons are available as a set. 25 episodes before all the mayhem of scrappy and other variations was done to the show. $50. Come on, it's a freaking 30 year old cartoon, and I have half of the episodes on the hard drive of my satellite tuner (mostly for my kid, but I like them too). Now I could burn them to DVD from there, or just keep them on the HD perpetually, but if the DVD set was anywhere close to $20 I'd pop for it.
Now recent big budget series where they releasing the DVD is denting the value of syndication of the series, it makes sense for this type of pricing (in which case I would probably wait out discounting). But they don't seem to follow the model of movies, where older titles typically get discounted up to 50% eventually. It just seems they've chosen a pricing structure that disourages mass purchasing, and the they'd make more money at a lower price point.
The only show I have come close to actually buying was Farscape, but that is even pricier per episode. A small poll of friends/coworkers, results in near complete agreement with my feelings, but they are not the DVD buying fiends we are, so thought I'd find out if I'm the anomaly, or if there's a decent percentage of you who react similarly.
Pipe in.
BB
Every time I see a TV show being released on DVD that I want, I find myself put off by the price, and have not, to date, bought a single one. Seems like everything out there is priced at $40-50 per one or two season set.
I realize they are approaching this from the "hours of material" pricing model, and since you are typically getting 10x or more material time-wise, compared to a motion picture, this seems a logical price point, given that movies go for $15-20.
However, my emotional response prevents me from framing it in these terms. This is usually material I've already seen, it lacks the production value of a film (on average), was FREE (discounting buying a TV and cable/satellite costs) when first viewed. It's also probably that I am less likely to fire up the FP for something like this, so it sure doesn't feel as valuable.
What brought this home was noticing that the first 3 years of Scooby-doo cartoons are available as a set. 25 episodes before all the mayhem of scrappy and other variations was done to the show. $50. Come on, it's a freaking 30 year old cartoon, and I have half of the episodes on the hard drive of my satellite tuner (mostly for my kid, but I like them too). Now I could burn them to DVD from there, or just keep them on the HD perpetually, but if the DVD set was anywhere close to $20 I'd pop for it.
Now recent big budget series where they releasing the DVD is denting the value of syndication of the series, it makes sense for this type of pricing (in which case I would probably wait out discounting). But they don't seem to follow the model of movies, where older titles typically get discounted up to 50% eventually. It just seems they've chosen a pricing structure that disourages mass purchasing, and the they'd make more money at a lower price point.
The only show I have come close to actually buying was Farscape, but that is even pricier per episode. A small poll of friends/coworkers, results in near complete agreement with my feelings, but they are not the DVD buying fiends we are, so thought I'd find out if I'm the anomaly, or if there's a decent percentage of you who react similarly.
Pipe in.
BB
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