Where can I buy legitimate copies of tv shows?

[RAHRL]

I wonder where I can purchase legitimate copies of tv shows. I am especially interested in American, British, Dutch and German retro tv shows, but it is really hard to find them once you’ve got the readily available ones.

Examples of rare finds are Barnaby Jones, Marcus Welby M.D., Spin City, I, Spy, Police Woman and many more.

I know about Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc., but they offer only a limited range of titles and in some cases I have my doubts of the originality.

Where do people get their dvd boxes?

[dcoke22]

I usually buy things on Amazon.com and almost always only from Amazon, not a random seller. I have, however, also purchased some stuff on Warner Archive. They're usually burn-on-demand, but they're legit and worked just fine.

I've seen people talk about Gruv, but I've never ordered from there. Gruv is owned by Universal Pictures, so they're selling legit stuff too.

If your tastes are more esoteric, there's always Vinegar Syndrome. Kino Lorber will sell stuff direct as well. As will Criterion Collection.

[RAHRL]

Thx for the links, I wasn’t familiar with some of them. However, I actually meant tv shows, not movies. The majority of movies are not impossible to lay a hand on.

TV-shows, like the ones I mentioned, but many more, are much more arduous. Many of the tv shows from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s are close to impossible to acquire in a legitimate way, even more if you don’t want to buy from an Amazon partner because you don’t know whether you will receive a counterfeit (which happened to me at least once).

Until recently there were many retro tv shows available on Etsy for digital download, but the quality was often poor and sometimes certain episodes in shows that were sold as complete were missing. The situation suddenly changed from one day to another when virtually all these sellers vanished from Etsy without any notice, I suspect due to copyright infringements. Some recordings looked more like screen grabbing, they probably weren’t legitimate.

YouTube also has episodes of tv shows but for some reason many playlists are not complete, there are always a few episodes missing (or hidden as the call it, I believe).
This happens so much, it can hardly be a coincidence any more.

There are sites like the Film Collectors Society of America, filmcsa.com, but they have a limited offer of tv shows and I never ordered anything from them, so far.
Same thing pertains to another site, Oldies.com.

If copyright holders are serious about battling piracy, the first thing they ought to do is to make legitimate dvd boxes widely available. Otherwise, customers willing to pay up for the real thing have no other option than to turn to illegitimate channels and these channels will continue to pop up.

[dcoke22]

I have purchased a TV show from Warner Archive.

The internet says Spin City was released on home media by Shout! Factory, but it seems to be out of print at the moment. Shout! Factory has lots of TV shows for sale, however.

Police Woman also seems to have been released by Shout! Factory. It seems that they only have 3 of the 4 seasons in stock.

I, Spy seems to have been released by multiple studios, including Timeless Media, aka Shout! Factory (though it seems to be out of print there).

Barnaby Jones seems to have been released by a company called Visual Entertainment where it is currently sold out.

Marcus Welby, M.D. apparently only has the first two seasons released at Shout! Factory. Those two seasons also seem to be at Amazon for a bit less money.

[RAHRL]

I appreciate the effort, but I need so many more ... i.e. The Fall Guy, In the Heat of the Night, LA Law, Ironside, Thirtysomething, Dragnet, Fantasy Island, Love Boat, The Monkees, Dear John, etc., etc., ...

And I generally buy only complete shows, because I know I want the complete thing eventually and the effort to complete the series increases inverse exponentially with the number of seasons missing.

It seems the boxes are produced in batches and some hurdle needs to be taken once a batch is sold out. I don't know why that is, perhaps the production of a batch requires a considerable investment or perhaps new copyright negotiations are required to bring a new batch to the market. I really don't know how that works,
But at the same time prices go up sky high, because there is demand without ample supply.

I once bought a legit version of Married with Children, and from season 3 and up they replaced the original opening song (Love and Marriage by Frank Sinatra) by a surrogate tune. Without doubt, that was due to unreasonable copyright demands by the copyright holders of the song. As a result however, the pertaining episodes are not the same thing anymore, unfortunately. I would have to fix that with MKVToolNix and/or Shotcut but that might take a while with so many episodes.

Rather annoying how these copyright negotiations seem to evolve. The industry has "butter on the head" as we say in Netherlands. On the one side complaining about copyright infringements, but on the other side not providing ample supplies of dvd-boxes. I believe video piracy would vanish for a large part if there would be sufficient supply at reasonable prices.

[dcoke22]

I'm a fan of The Muppet Show from the late 1970s. Only the first 3 seasons have been released on DVD (out of 5 seasons). And there are bits missing on the DVDs because they couldn't work out a deal for the rights to release everything on DVD. It was apparently quite a large effort to get the various rights and clearances needed, but since The Muppet Show was a variety show with lots of different songs and famous people every week, it made it almost impossible to track down everyone or their heirs and get an agreement worked out.

I'm not sure if piracy would disappear if more stuff was legitimately available, but it would certainly be less. When the iTunes store more or less made every song ever available for about $1, it no longer seemed worth the hassle to steal music.

It looks like In the Heat of the Night has similar clearance issues.

It looks like you can get all 4 seasons of Thirtysomething at Shout! Factory. There's very few copies left it seems.

[bmillham]

I'm a fan of The Muppet Show from the late 1970s. Only the first 3 seasons have been released on DVD (out of 5 seasons). And there are bits missing on the DVDs because they couldn't work out a deal for the rights to release everything on DVD.

Another show that was really chopped when they released the DVD was WKRP in Cincinnati. Because of music rights a lot of the original songs were replaced. For some it didn't really matter, but it actually ruins some scenes, like in Turkeys Away when Johnny is playing Pink Floyd Dogs (from the Animals album). While the latest DVD is better with that scene, it still just is not near a funny as if Pink Floyd had allowed them to play that 10-20 seconds of Dogs.

[TheStill]

I'm in the UK so not sure if they'll be available to you. But the two I mostly use is Musicmagpie and World of Books.

Although the seasons available are always random. I might get seasons 2 and 5 today but have to wait a year to get season 1. Sometimes that's from general availability and others from strange pricing. Season 2 might be £2 then season 3 £40 so not worth paying their crazy mark ups.

[dcoke22]

I'm in the UK so not sure if they'll be available to you. But the two I mostly use is Musicmagpie and World of Books.

Although the seasons available are always random. I might get seasons 2 and 5 today but have to wait a year to get season 1. Sometimes that's from general availability and others from strange pricing. Season 2 might be £2 then season 3 £40 so not worth paying their crazy mark ups.

It looks like both of those places, MusicMagpie and World of Books, sell used DVDs and blu-rays. Have you ever ended up with a counterfeit disc? People buying on eBay or from a random seller on Amazon seem to end up with counterfeit discs from time to time.