Utopia: Series Two

[Buzz201]

Originally Posted by malcy30

You have captured the quandry that especially the TV companies have with releasing their shows on BD. They want a premium price to make up for the chip as chips DVD prices and the lower revenue they make from the subscription streaming (Netflix etc) compared to DVDs golden age in the late 1990s / early 2000s when they could sell large volumes of new release TV shows on DVD at £30 to £50 a season (people now expect that price for a whole shows run so 7+ seasons).

There are two things they forget
- Economic climate is very different to 10 years ago where the mass public need to save money so are happy with a cheap DVD boxset or watching via Netflix, Virgin, Sky etc on demand
- There is a market for BD but it needs to be a premium product at a fair price eg look at the effort studios like Arrow, Eureka and BFI but into their BD with loads of newly commissioned extras at around £13 a go.
What people will not pay for is when a TV company releases a series / season of TV and expects £30+ with no extras and minimal cost to them as show already exists in HD.

It seems in the UK studios are happy to say we are prepared to forgo BD sales as enough people will buy DVD instead and the "real BD fans" will import from elsewhere so we still get our money.

Also for UK TV I am sure I have read there are licensing cost and residual issues for the actors fees. So sell a BD of a BBC, ITV or C4 show in the UK and the actors get a cut. Release in Spain, Germany or US and they get hardly anything or nothing so much lower fees for the local distributor so making a BD release more economic.

I do feel however the public broadcasters BBC and C4 should be much more proactive with BD even if it is only breaks even for them. They still sell to the BD sterotype that product only sells to "boys with toys" so with the BBC you get BDs of Top Gear and Doctor Who but not the costume dramas as their older audience are happy with cheap DVDs.

C4 are presently a loss making venture (with huge cash reserves - which is why it wasn't especially big news), so maybe they should get into profit first, before focussing on stuff that won't make any money.

With the BBC, there's another factor that causes a problem for BD releases. People pay the licence fee to the BBC (some of it goes to S4C and other projects, but most people see it as going to the BBC), and so they can't charge a lot for DVD or BD releases, otherwise they get accused of profiteering, and people go off on one about how they've already paid for it once and shouldn't have to pay again. So the BBC may not always be able to get away with expensive releases of less popular series, even if it wanted to.