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> I've seen a ton of movies via it that I've wanted to watch for decades but couldn't find

It blows my mind how much stuff (old stuff! especially non-blockbusters) isn't available anywhere streaming. I can't imagine why you wouldn't release a lot of that stuff and make a bit of extra money on those old titles.

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There's the obvious reason -- that digitization is expensive, relatively speaking -- but even more so, the rights to a lot of those older movies are not well defined. Many of those older movies are under contracts that have no provision for digitization, and in many cases the rightsholders who could grant a license are unknown. It's a mess.

And that's a great case for actually allowing copyrights to expire at some point.

> There's the obvious reason -- that digitization is expensive

Um, if it's on DVD it's already digitized.

It's unfortunately not that simple. Nobody uses DVD as a mezzanine format, partly because 4:2:0 MPEG-2 at DVD data rates is unsuitable for further manipulation, and partly because the DVD rights holders may not hold the rights to republish. It's a mess.

I just meant that in the process of producing a DVD, all the material would have to have been digitized. I'm sure for some releases the production companies have gone bankrupt and/or the files are lost -- but I'd think that once digitized the masters would be kept around?

You'd like to think so, but for the most part, the digitization and prep work is done by post houses or specialist digital distribution services, and the intermediates, which cost money to preserve, are almost always discarded.

I presume because the IP owner thinks the extra royalties they'd make off the streaming would be less than the cost of digitizing, metadata creation, etc.

I have some record albums from the 1950's. A few years ago, I checked around and they weren't available anywhere, even used, not no-how not no-way.

But recently I noticed them showing up on Amazon as mp3 downloads. Evidently, record companies are finally going through their back catalogs and making this stuff available again.

It's happening more and more with old paperback books, too, showing up as kindle books or collections on a dvd.

It hasn't happened yet for, say, made-for-TV movies produced in the 1970s.

I also think there'd be money to be made in simply producing an online archive of Channel 7 News broadcasts from 1975. Wouldn't that be fun to look at now and then?

> I also think there'd be money to be made in simply producing an online archive of Channel 7 News broadcasts from 1975. Wouldn't that be fun to look at now and then?

Probably, but often this just plain doesn't exist. I tried to get footage from a news station back in the 90s and they basically said they only keep the really notable days and otherwise recycle the tape after a few years.

http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/marion-stokes-vhs-inte...

Which news station? I know public broadcasters across Europe generally keep very extensive archives (that are generally now being, or have recently been, digitized).

It was a local station in a small market in Wisconsin. I don't know, maybe the guy just wanted to get rid of me.

The television series Perfect Strangers is probably never, ever going to be rereleased, and you can blame the Bibbi-Babka Ditty.

See, the series makes use of a few licensed popular songs -- not as background or incidental music, but as songs sung by the main characters, often in Balki's native language or as a part of his culture, making them central to the show's jokes. (The Bibbi-Babka Ditty was one such, a version of Chubby Checker's "Limbo Rock" that must be sung while baking delicious Myposian pastries known as Bibbi-Babkas.)

So editing them out or replacing them with generic music, as was done for example with the rerelease of Daria which had all its popular background music removed, isn't an option.

It's kind of sad because perhaps the purest exemplar of "80s sitcom" will be lost to history.

So, the same problem as Nintendo has in bringing Mother 3 to the US.

Is there an opportunity here? I regularly 'digitize' old media for archival purposes. If a lot of Netflix DVDs are truly not available anywhere else, I would consider simply ripping them, storing them online and sharing them via p2p.

Legalities aside, there is definitely a market. In AU we have quickflix.com.au. I don't even have a working DVD player anymore. But when I did, I almost exclusively got DVDs that were hard to find even on torrent sites.

The industry argument is that old stock dilutes new purchases. That's one reason why book publishers avoid re-publishing cheap editions of out of copyright work.

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