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EDITORIAL: Regular readers may have noticed of late that there have been several news posts at TVShowsOnDVD about delays in street dates of various sets. News posts just made this morning about Paramount-distributed shows South Park - Season 5 and America's Next Top Model are just examples of such recent delays lately, from many studios both large and small. In the South Park news we had some fun with Cartman's running gag of saying "Screw you guys, I'm going home!." But we're not really discouraged, nor should you be!
Long-time regular readers might have noticed a pattern: the largest amount of street-date delays seem to happen in the months leading up to the Winter Holiday season. From what we've been able to discern, this has become a regular Fall occurence each year in the DVD industry, as the production plants get booked up to capacity on every manufacturing line. Sooner or later they realize that there's not enough room in the plants to produce every title that the studios want them to, at least in the quanties needed to fill demand.
During the holidays, every studio wants to have their biggest and best titles in stores, in high volumes, during the busy shopping months of November and December. The sooner the better, because the trend is for you, the consumer, to do your gift-shopping earlier and earlier each year. So the vast majority of hot items hit from mid-October to early December, and during the months leading up to that, the plants are working overtime (and weekends) to make DVDs that go in your holiday shopping cart. The answer isn't "build more factories," because the rest of the year that much capacity isn't needed.
We don't know what the exact process is, but we suspect there are different ways that titles get delayed as a result. Theories include the ever-popular "first come, first served" one, where the title getting their order in last gets pushed off the schedule. That probably happens in some cases. More than likely the company which runs the disc-stamping plant works with the studio to decide which titles are must-haves and which ones can more safely be rescheduled until a few months down-the-road.
To give you a made-up example (and we'll switch to a non-Paramount situation, to emphasize that this is just us thinking out loud, and not an actual situation to the best of our knowledge): if a studio - say, Fox - is seeing huge sales of The Passion of the Christ and the title is selling out, they probably aren't going to cut production of Star Wars Trilogy box sets to make more room on the production lines. They will probably delay a lesser title (and what better choice than a multi-disc TV-on-DVD set, and gain that much more room on the production lines?) to an after-Christmas release date, so that they can use the extra time on manufacturing lines they've already booked to pick up more copies of the hot-selling Passion...and maybe print up a few more copies of Star Wars too. Just in case it sells okay, too. Which, of course, it is...VERY well, in fact!
As a consumer - which we are here at TVShowsOnDVD, despite also being fortunate enough to report on the DVD news - it is extremely frustrating when it's YOUR FAVORITE SHOW that's getting delayed. We know. But be patient. It's coming. Believe me, the studios want to sell you this stuff. It's just the chaos of the DVD production schedule leading up to the holidays which leads to so many delays at this time of year. Of course, studios also move things around when they realize that the release date they chose is already quite full, perhaps with other TV-on-DVD releases, or perhaps with a super-hot film (or films). Don't worry, though: you'll get your discs in the end!
  
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