TV Shows on DVD is
reporting that the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
will be released on DVD on July 6, 2004. (The December 9, 2003
release of season five was announced some time ago.) Season six
includes Once More With Feeling. I know I’m not the only
one who considers that the best episode of the series.
Whoa
Yet again I’m surprised, having been in a shop this morning where Buffy season 6 has been on DVD for some time. Why is it that the UK is so far ahead on DVD releases of Buffy and Angel? Not that I’m complaining, but it doesn’t make much sense to me.
Of course, I can still be miffed that the VHS releases of season seven now have stickers on them saying ‘not on DVD until 2004’, which smacks to me of deliberate money-grabbing by trying to make people buy the tapes, then the DVDs later.
If I had my way they wouldn’t release them on VHS at all…
Re: Whoa
I’m sure the sticking point has to do with how lucrative the syndication deals are in the US versus the UK and everywhere else. It could also be contractual differences in the structuring of said syndication deals where one contract might guarantee time-limited exclusivity of content where another would allow DVD sales. It’s interesting to me that Angel is one of the first series I’ve seen which has been released on DVD (two seasons in the US) before I’ve seen it appear in syndication.
Re: Whoa
That would make sense, as we barely have syndication. Probably something to do with being a reasonably small country (compared to the USA at least, seems big enough when driving up and down it). Buffy and Angel appear here first on Sky One, a digital cable/satellite channel which a lot of people don’t have because most people (I think most people) still rely solely on terrestrial TV, be it digital or analogue. Once Sky One have shown a season, it will, after some delay (usually when Sky are about to show the next one) appear on BBC Two, which everyone can get. The same kind of thing happens with Star Trek, except that the BBC got out-bid for Enterprise, and so it’s gone to Channel 4. Not that we care very much.
Oddly enough (and this is completely irrelevant) this pattern didn’t hold with 24, which I would have thought Sky would be drooling over, but it actually showed first on the BBC, not all that far behind its showing in the USA. Even odder, the BBC showed it on BBC Three (a digital-only channel) and BBC Two at the same time, with BBC Three one week ahead (and with a discussion/phone-in show on after the episode). Presumably some kind of attempt to get people to buy terrestrial digital decoder boxes. It might even have worked, but the fact that the things only cost around a hundred pounds these days probably has more to do with it.