40 - RAL 13 - Gahhhh!

I’m sorry brothers, but I really don’t have anything to write about this week.

Dan, you complained a few weeks about being sorely lacking in inspiration, and so didn’t have much to write about. Well you still managed to write a whole blog, though off the top of my head, I can’t remember what the subject was. I am not as skilled as filling empty space with nothing. I would make a poor politician in that regard.

So instead, we are going to have a slight annoyance week. Considering that our theme.

My annoyance for this week:

The prices of DVDs.

This might seem more in your department Dan, but I am less picky than you in the sense that I still buy DVDs, as opposed to you, who shells out ridiculous amounts of money to buy blu-rays.

What bothers me about DVD pricing is that there seems to be no correlation at all between content, and how much is charged for it. Take for example ‘Arrested Development.’ It is a show with a constantly running storyline, an abundance of running gags, and just an overall great-to-be-marathonned feel to it. As such, each season came in one DVD package, priced at the reasonable $28. Now you might say, “But wait a minute, don’t the seasons dramatically decrease in episode count, so should technically be cheaper?” To which I would respond, “Well, yes. But Fox wants to sell as many as possible to people who don’t know this fact. So putting all three at a reasonable price makes. What’s more, people who have seen it would be willing to pay that much anyway.” So this makes sense. The content matches how it is sold.

But here’s where things get difficult. I was poking around my favorite mixed media retailer the other day, and I happened upon the recently mentioned ‘Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated.’ I remember reading on Wikipedia that it also had a continuous storytelling format, and would bring all sorts of childhood nostalgia to the forefront of viewing. Well Wikipedia didn’t say the second part, but I know that it would. I know that both seasons have 26 episodes, so I assumed it would be the same case as ‘Arrested Development.’ The whole seasons would be bundled together, and put at a reasonable price so that anyone who knows Scooby Doo would be happy to buy it. Well this was far, far from the truth of the matter.

I picked a DVD off the shelf, and saw that it was ‘Season 1: Volume 4.’ “Hmmmm,” I thought, “That makes absolutely no sense at all. Why would you break up a tv show that has a continuous story into volumes. Not only that, but from my rough calculations, into 6 volumes. Are they are least quite cheap making it easy to be convinced to buy them?”

No, no they weren’t. There were 6 volumes, per season, and each cost $10. That means, for a single season of a TV show, that has a continuous story, that is trying to get sold to the largest possible audience, it costs $60!!!! A live action, prime time comedy-drama costs $28, and you get the whole season, and this private channel, minimally viewed, wide audience appealing show costs $60 and you don’t even get it all at once. In fact, at the store, they only had one volume of it in stock.

Now I’m guessing that parents would just by a volume or two, and the kids wouldn’t notice that the story just doesn’t get resolved. To marketing and promotions teams, this might make sense, but marketing and promotions teams are among the oblivious and short sighted people on the planet, determined to make $10-20 per person right now, instead of $60+ in the long run. But this is bad marketing in every possible way. First, it’s assuming that only parents shopping for their young children would by these DVDs, when I promise you that the market for Scooby Doo is everyone who has ever been a child since the shows premiere in 1969. Second, it’s assuming that this massive audience is entirely oblivious people who won’t realise that they are only watching a small fragment of a much larger whole. And thirdly, it’s really fricking cheap. When I slip down to the DVD store to pick up a show that I really want to watch, I don’t want to have to pay $60 to only get half of it, and to probably not even get that half because they only have one-sixth of it. So instead of selling the whole thing, in one package (well two, one for each season), at a good price, so attracting the maximum possible sales, and so generating the maximum possible revenue, they would rather sell it in 12 different parts, leading to massive overpricedness, huge inconvenience, and ridiculous narrowing of the target audience.

And it is not limited just to Scooby Doo. They do this to a ton of shows, and strangely enough, it often seems to be the shows that have continuous stories. And it also often seems to be not-primetime animations. It’s cheap, it’s frustrating, and that is my annoyance for the week.

Favorite Song Of The Moment:

            ‘Atlas’ by Coldplay. I am quite ‘The Hunger Games’ fan, and this actually came out a couple weeks ago. What I’m not is a big Coldplay fan, but I love this song. It’s emotional, and catchy, and so ‘Hunger Games.’ I haven’t stopped listening to it for a couple days now, so that’s my favorite song of the moment.

Looking forward to reading about your annoyance for the week.

R. A. Lyons.