Yesterday I blathered on about asshole movie studios depriving customers of what they paid for... access to movies and shows that were sold to them. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Something I cannot fathom is how studios will sit on shows they own and not release them for people to enjoy. This was something that hit me pretty hard after Stephen Dunham died in 2012. He was the star of Oh Grow Up! (from 1999), a series I loved that can't be watched anywhere. It was never released on DVD, was never offered digitally and, from what I can tell, has never been shown on any network after its original run. I have it recorded on 8mm tape somewhere, but don't know that I have a player capable of playing them even if I could find the tapes. You can tapes to be converted to digital, but companies won't do it because they're copyrighted material.
What a waste. Dunham was a good actor and his work deserves to be seen. The pilot episode is on YouTube, but not much else...
Sometimes you can get lucky. There was a show called The Palace Guard (from 1991) which I loved that was eventually released as a part of a Stephen J. Cannell DVD collection set (and I've seen it on some free-view services from time to time... it's currently playing for free on Plex). It was a fun show about a cat burglar that becomes a security expert for an international chain of hotels. But I don't know how much longer those DVDs will even work, if they haven't crapped out already (see yesterday's post)...
Other times you can get... kinda lucky. A Connie Sellecca and Greg Evigan vehicle I liked called P.S.I. Luv U (also from 1991) was never released for home video in any format... but some kind soul uploaded all episodes to YouTube nine years ago, albeit in atrocious quality, and I have watched through them all a couple times...
No idea how legal it is, but if the studio who owns it isn't going to do anything with the show, somebody has to. It's one of six series I would very much be thrilled to purchase (and there's plenty of others)...
The frustrating thing about all this is that it costs practically nothing to convert a show to digital format. It's all automated. You put the tapes in the machine and push a button. The software which encodes it and cleans it up doesn't require any technical expertise. Just a person to load/unload.
You'd think with streaming networks desperate to have content for their services which are exceedingly cheap, this would be a no-brainer. But it's not like you could accuse studio executives of having a brain.
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I cannot imagine the vaults of media that exist and the number of shows and movies that haven’t been released to digital. As you said, it’s not difficult and there are tools that make it easy. I think the studios are more interested in shareholders than customers.