Hitchhiker's Guide, Salmon of Doubt

ReadParse writes "There was a previous story about "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" being released on DVD in January. This turned out to be a Region 2 DVD, but the Region 1 DVD was released on or about April 30th. There are two discs, the first of which is the BBC Miniseries, which was adapted from the BBC radio play. It suddenly occurs to me to submit this story, because mine was just delivered within the past hour. Right now it's the 12th most popular DVD on Amazon." Several people also noted that Adams' final (I guess) book, The Salmon of Doubt, is now hitting the shelves.

Comments

Mostly harmless = ~HHGTTG

[wowbagger]

Any "furthur adventures" of the HHGTTG crew in Salmon would have be set before Mostly Harmless, since in Mostly Harmless Douglas destroyed the HHGTTG universe (in the sense that he killed off all the major characters save Zaphod). He did so in an especially mean-spirited way - he didn't even give Fendchurch a proper exit, just erased her like a bad core dump.

I am (as you might guess from my /. nick) a HHGTTG fan, but I was quite disappointed with MH - it felt too much like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Final Solution" - an author killing off a series that has become too popular, too much a millstone around the author's neck.

I would suggest to those who have NOT read MH to stop with So Long and Thanks for All the Fish - I think you will be much happier.

Zone *what* ?

[AftanGustur]

What could possibly be the reason for zone locking more than 10 year old television material ??

Re:Radio Series

[stevelup]

I'd recommend downloading the full twelve episodes of the Radio Series (Fit the 1st to Fit the 12th) on Kazaa (or any P2P) in MP3 format

Hey, you could - of course - buy it instead of stealing it!

BBC Shop

It's an anti-free trade measure

[squarooticus]

Region encoding was never about piracy or release dates. It was always about extracting the maximum amount of money from each market, by making it very difficult for people in richer countries to play the same imported content sold in a poorer country at a lower price.

Re:It's an anti-free trade measure

[spectecjr]

This is correct - mod up!

Actually, it's only partly correct.

For some material, there are licensing issues for other countries - depending on:

1. What music is used in the piece.
2. What brands/pictures appear in the piece.
3. Distributor rights for different countries.
4. Royalties for different countries.

etc etc etc.

Region coding allows them to get around these problems, by treating each release as a single case, instead of having to resolve all licensing issues in one version.

For example, when The Prisoner and DangerMan were released on DVD, Carlton UK had the rights to european distribution (they bought the rights to all of Lord Lew Grade's back catalog - ATV, IIRC), whereas the US rights were owned by a subsidiary of A&E. Because of this historical rights assignations, Carlton could only release a Region 1 version (hey, I phoned them and asked them). So for a long time there it was unlikely that the US was going to get The Prisoner, and nigh-on impossible that the US was going to get Secret Agent/Danger Man. Luckily, A&E have started releasing the Danger Man DVDs in the US. *phew*

Now, it is also used to keep prices at local market rates, instead of dropping to a global minimum. But that's not the whole story.

Simon