I noticed that Jib-Jab post I made a while back only stayed up for a couple of days before it was yanked.
I can sort of understand the Jib-Jab one. Those guys make their money through advertising by drawing people to their web site, so they loose out if people can bypass their site and watch their videos via Youtube.
I can tell you all of those videos of Stooge shorts that False Alarms posted have been yanked off of You Tube, along with the Tex Avery cartoon I posted awhile back as well as one of the Jasper "puppettoons" I posted.
Those are the ones I am particularly pissed over. As I said earlier, no one is making money by offering these videos, you can't just download them, and (as xraffle pointed out) the video quality isn't good enough to discourage anyone from buying those videos. If anything, these Youtube videos can only
encourage people to
buy them, assuming Sony ever gets their collective heads out of their asses and release them as they should. (I've never seen people more incompetent at marketing a valuable product.)
If any of you Sony/Columbia crowd are paying any attention, the formula to making the big bucks is stupidly simple:
- Chronologically ordered sets! We want to watch them in the order they were released. That shouldn't be hard to understand.
- The episodes are only 16-20 min. long, and there were only 7 to 10 shorts per year, so issue a full year's worth on a DVD. Don't be stingy.
- Use decent quality prints!
- Add "Play All" to the menu! is that really asking so much?
Some decent bonus materials would be nice, but even if
all you guys did was the above, and you price them realistically (say $12 or $15 per DVD, with a reasonably discounted full set of all 190 shorts available),
you are going to make money. That's been proven by all the people that were selling full sets of mixed quality on eBay. When I saw them, they were going like hotcakes and I would have thought that would give Sony a clue. Time will tell if they were paying attention, but from the way they keep driving fans away it doesn't seem that they were.