tvgeek
Member
Been going through upcoming release lists and it hit me the same way it hit a thread I was reading: nearly everything getting announced now starts in the 70s. Timeless is still putting out early material, Shout has clearly swung toward 70s shows, you get the occasional MPI or Warner title, but the 50s and early 60s stuff has slowed to a trickle.
It makes commercial sense in a depressing way. The people who watched those shows first run are the people buying the sets, and that audience shrinks every year. Worse, there is no upgrade path. Most of that material survives as kinescopes or 16mm, so there is no Blu-ray remaster to sell you the same season a second time, which is how catalog labels usually fund the next release. DVD is the ceiling, and once a title goes out of print it tends to stay there.
Streaming is not going to rescue it either. Rights clearance on a show from 1961 means chasing music licenses and estates for something that will pull a few thousand views. Nobody is funding that math.
My honest advice is buy the sets you want while they are still on a shelf at list price. I sat on a couple of Timeless releases and now I watch them go for triple on the secondary market, which is a self-inflicted wound I would rather other people avoid.
What is the last pre-1965 set anyone here bought new rather than hunted down used? I want to know whether the pipeline is genuinely dead or whether I am looking in the wrong places.
It makes commercial sense in a depressing way. The people who watched those shows first run are the people buying the sets, and that audience shrinks every year. Worse, there is no upgrade path. Most of that material survives as kinescopes or 16mm, so there is no Blu-ray remaster to sell you the same season a second time, which is how catalog labels usually fund the next release. DVD is the ceiling, and once a title goes out of print it tends to stay there.
Streaming is not going to rescue it either. Rights clearance on a show from 1961 means chasing music licenses and estates for something that will pull a few thousand views. Nobody is funding that math.
My honest advice is buy the sets you want while they are still on a shelf at list price. I sat on a couple of Timeless releases and now I watch them go for triple on the secondary market, which is a self-inflicted wound I would rather other people avoid.
What is the last pre-1965 set anyone here bought new rather than hunted down used? I want to know whether the pipeline is genuinely dead or whether I am looking in the wrong places.
