Hitchhiker's Guide DVD to be released on January 28

hitchhacker writes "It looks like The BBC series version of 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' is being released on DVD January 28, 2002. 'disc set contains all six episodes from the classic BBC sci-fi comedy as well 10 minutes of additional footage which was cut to acheive the 30 minute run time. Also included are a few additional features - making of, deleted scenes, interviews and more.'" CD: Word has it that this is a region 2 dvd.

Comments

Re:why on earth?

[forged]

The purpose of region encoding is to ensure that a movie leaving US markets can be "staged" into foriegn markets

You're forgetting that other countries produce film material, too. The region coding in this case is to ensure EU marget gets served first before anyone else can get it.

Region encoding [...] serves no purpose other than to simultaneously reduce sales and annoy customers.

I couldn't agree more with this statement.
Now imagine that this would be the case for you almost every time a movie comes out on DVD. Annoying, eh?

Why would the BBC want to stop sales of this DVD to the US? The math is simple...more sales means more money ...

Your point is also valid viewed in the other perspective. Why would the US firms possibly want EU and other zones to wait sometimes 6 months or 1 year, to get the material on DVD ? See all the points above.. Makes no sense to me.

Re:why on earth?

[Zeinfeld]

Well, I agree that it's annoying, but as much as I hate to admit it I can sort of see the logic for Region encoding for films . I still don't like it, but I see the logic.

The purpose of region encoding, from start to finish was to support differential pricing. The story about movie releases is a smokescreen. If the industry execs. stated that the purpose of zone encoding was to allow them to maintain DVD prices in Europe that were double those in the US they would end up in jail.

In fact they may still end up with a huge fine. The EU commission is investigating the DVD zone encoding scam and unlike the US regulators they are not easily bought off with Enron sized campaign contributions.