alt Hacker News> The Blu-ray collection appears to be available for about $100.
It saddens me that people aren't willing to pay a pittance in cash (about $1 an hour) for entertainment. They're willing to spend their time, but not their money.
This isn't just buying a 100 episode box set, it applies to people complaining "I'd have to spend $10 on $streaming_service to watch that 5 hour miniseries, that's terrible" too.
Replies
I think the aversion to subscribing to a streaming service for a single series has more to do with the recurring nature of the subscription than it does the price. You have to remember to cancel it when you’re done, which is easy to forget with so many things bring for our attention these days. That $10 could easily multiply several times over if it slips your mind, at which point congratulations, you’ve paid a significant portion of the box set’s price to rent the series.
All streaming services should offer prepaid options, so you can add time in 30/60/90 day increments. Less mental overhead and it better matches how a lot of people pay for streaming anyway.
When I buy the box set, at least I'll be able to watch it in perpetuity. $10 to own a 5 hour miniseries would be more than reasonable, but I don't want to have to pay $10 each time I want to watch it. (If I even can watch it, and they haven't lost the license in the interim.)
for me, its downloading the torrent and keeping it forever on my hard drive and not paying 100 dollars.
It’s not just pure value analysis, it’s a lack of confidence that the money will go to the people that deserve it.
I’m not going to spend a hundred bucks to try a series I may not even like. It would be one thing if I loved it and wanted to watch it again, or if I had seen enough to know that I want to watch it all. But that’s a lot of money for an unknown quantity.
I'd be delighted to spend that for a Blu-ray of the series but I'm afraid of getting the mangled version that they released on DVD.
For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.
It made everyone weep.