Ten years ago today people were enjoying DVD releases of the original
Fawlty Towers - Complete Collection set, single-disc titles (in the orange cases...remember those?) of
Star Trek - Vol. 35: That Which Survives/Let That Be Your Last Battlefield and
Star Trek - Vol. 36: Whom Gods Destroy/The Mark Of Gideon, A&E's two-disc packages of
The Avengers - '68 Set 1: Volumes 1 & 2 and
The Avengers - '68 Set 1: Volumes 3 & 4, and kids were enjoying "sugar, spice, everything nice, concocted with Professor Utonium's Chemical X" in
The Powerpuff Girls - Power Pack...just to name a few TV-DVD releases at the end of October 2001. The following Tuesday would see a pair of single-disc
South Park titles, the 2-episode disc of
Farscape - Season 1, Vol 08, the bigger release of
The Sopranos - The Complete 2nd Season, and the HBO mini-series
the World at War. On November 1 2001, site founder-programmer-webmaster Gord Lacey
made it official: TVShowsOnDVD was officially launched!
That wasn't the first day of work on the site, either...not by a long shot! Gord had begun putting TVShowsOnDVD ("TSoD") together at the beginning of the year, posting the first news item ever (that the U.K. show
Black Adder was in the works) in February 2001, and putting more content (news and DVD title listings) onto the site in the months to come. He didn't want to launch an "empty" site; it was important to him that people find TVShowsOnDVD to be useful from the first day it went public. For my part, I had been helping Gord beta-test the site for the month leading up to the launch, following the work of several alpha-testers who had helped him previously. What was the TV-on-DVD scene like in those days, and why did we feel a site like this was necessary? Here's a quote from a write-up I did five years ago, which still explains it very well:
The first TV-DVD was July 97's Beavis And Butt-Head - The Final Judgment. By November '98 came the first complete mini-series release, From the Earth to the Moon. In May 2000 came the first season set in the format we've come to take for granted today: X-Files - The Complete 1st Season. So all the basic TV-DVD elements were in place by the time Gord started this site and went live with it...he (and I) simply thought that there wasn't enough of these kind of releases on the market, and knew that DVD was the first home video format that we could reasonably expect to see large amounts of television episodes to be published to. A lot of you felt the same way, and TVShowsOnDVD gave you a place to voice that opinion via your votes, and find out the latest news about what was going on.
Gord likes to say that he started the site because he was bored one day. However true that may be, the fact is that in his boredom he had an idea about something which I thought was a great concept, and which so many of you obviously have, too...because here we all are today, 10 years later! That's why after the beta testing was finished and the site was launched, I continued to pitch in, pointing Gord toward news posts he had overlooked. And then I helped by providing reviews on the site for TV-DVD releases. But doing reviews isn't really my thing, and so I stopped around the time TSoD hit its first anniversary. But soon after I moved back into the realm of contributing news, and I've been the "news guy" here ever since. I concentrate on that, and Gord now provides all the reviews, runs the databases which the site info is stored in, and does all the coding that's needed.
We each worked on the site as a labor of love (i.e., non-paying), while maintaining separate full-time jobs, until
TV Guide purchased TVShowsOnDVD in February 2007. That deal grew out of
an earlier collaboration for a printed book in late 2005 about TV-on-DVD releases, and the relationship moved forward from there until the marriage was sealed with a kiss on Valentine's Day 2007! Following that,
TV Guide contracted Gord and I to continue doing exactly what we've always done: bring you one of the best DVD news websites in the world, and the absolute best place for info about TV-on-DVD releases. We intend to keep on doing that, and we're confident that there will continue to be a market for people who want to own their favorite TV shows on physical media. So here's to another 10 years of TV-on-DVD and TV-on-BD (Blu-ray Disc) releases!
Want to know more background about how TVShowsOnDVD got started, how Gord and I "met," what our thoughts are about what we do, some perspective about how the industry works, how many news posts we've put on the site so far, and which TV-DVD releases are coming up that we're looking forward to? One of our longtime readers, Mike Blanchard of GeekCast Radio,
interviewed us recently and posted that 42-minute discussion this morning. Be sure to head to that website and check it out. And be sure to stick around our website for more of Dave's news, Gord's reviews, and more answers to the question "Is YOUR Favorite TV Show on DVD?" We're still here today, 10 years later, because of YOU. We thank you, very much, and we aim to keep on pleasing. Stay tuned!
