BBC gets a clue: Doctor Who on DVD
Yesterday while shopping for my wife’s anniversary present, I noticed that season 2 of the new Doctor Who (i.e. season 1 of the tenth doctor) is already available on DVD in the UK, even though the BBC hasn’t finished broadcasting it yet!. The unbroadcast episodes aren’t available yet, but apparently every three episodes or so, they release a new disc. No more waiting six months to catch up, or hoping they’re some decent seeds on BitTorrent.
Needless to say I promptly ordered the first few episodes (along with my wife’s anniversary present). Now if they’d waited until a year+ went buy to release, I’m sure I would have already seen it on the Sci-Fi channel or downloaded it from YouTube, or in some other way grabbed hold of a copy. But giving viewers what they want when they want it? That gets me to open my wallet. How brilliant! If only Hollywood were this smart.
There are a couple of caveats. As far as I can tell, the DVDs are only available in the UK so far. However amazon.co.uk will ship to the States. Presumably other retailers will as well. Furthermore, it’s region 2 encoded, which means U.S. viewers either need a region-free DVD player or a tool like Mac the Ripper to make a region-free copy first. This still isn’t ideal, but it’s a big step in the right direction.
June 12th, 2006 at 5:03 PM
It appears I once again deleted a valid comment off this entry while cleaning spam. To whoever submitted it, I apologize. I really do want your comments. I’ve enabled Akismet, and I hope that this will eliminate the need to manually clean all the spam, and the attendant risk of deleting good comments.
June 13th, 2006 at 2:54 AM
Hi there,
My comment (which was deleted) was simply that I thought it was Russell Davies who really understood the relationship between a TV serial and the DVD format. There are documentaries and cast interviews that are shown on BBC3 (a digitial channel) immediately after the Saturday evening show and then this are reused as extras on the DVD. Casanova was also relatively quick to DVD.
The first DVD I can remember being issued half-way through the running series in the UK was Lost though so this might be a trend originating with HBO who obviously have an interest in selling their shows overseas.