Hi there! This is Dave Lambert, News Director of TVShowsOnDVD.com. Usually I let webmaster & owner Gord Lacey (the guy I call "boss") do the talking about his site, but this one is more up my alley. As you may have noticed, last month (August 2005) we had a record-breaking number of news posts for our site: 236, to be exact. We're just thrilled to have so much to tell you, especially when you consider the humble beginnings of both the site...and the TV-on-DVD genre.
The
very first "for-real" news post this site ever made was in February 2001, for the British TV series
Black Adder. It was one of 5 news posts that month, including a VERY premature story - straight from the studio, mind you! - that
Star Trek Voyager would arrive on DVD before the year was out! That didn't actually come true until 3 years after that first month's worth of news, though. At the time Gord posted that stuff, the site was 9 months away from its public launch, and his stories were very short and informal, and aimed only at his Alpha and Beta testers.
It was in October of 2001, just about a month prior to the formal launch, that I agreed to help Gord out as a beta tester (he recruited me after seeing me talk about
Scooby-Doo with excruciating detail in an online discussion). After launch, I kept sending tidbits of info his way, anytime I saw a TV-DVD release listed at an online retail site or saw someone mention something in a public discussion website like the Home Theater Forum. He first mentioned my name on the site
in a 12/2001 Transformers story, and by the following March I was formally the only other "employee" of the site besides Gord...as a
reviewer who also posted the odd news item (
here's a link to my first). By November 2002, though, I wrapped up my reviewing career: I have a wife and a young son, and reviewing in the conscientious manner I wanted to ended up taking too much time away from my family. Since my help at TVShowsOnDVD is a labor of love (i.e., non-paying), I also have to have a full-time job that takes up most of my time both back then and through to today. Still, back then I continued to send news tips Gord's way, writing them up for him and the site, and by then I had begun a relationship with the studios to get more and more inside info. By October 2003, Gord named me the site's "News Director", formalizing the relationship we had had for close to a year.
As you can see from the chart below, the timing was right-on for that, too. The chart shows the number of news posts we've had here each month since Gord first started building the site. Back then, there weren't TOO many TV-DVDs to speak of, but a good start had been made. 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. When I stopped doing reviews near the end of 2002 and began concentrating on the news, Gord had started to need real help there: the TV-on-DVD genre was taking off, and the site's news was escalating along with it!
Since then, the most-wanted "holy grails" of movies have made it onto DVD already: the modern classic trilogies for
Back The The Future, Indiana Jones and the original
Star Wars films foremost among them. Many of the older classics have made it out, too, with very few of the
AFI top 100 films not yet on DVD (but plans exist for several of the remaining ones, including a recently announced street date for 1933's
King Kong and production mentioned for
The African Queen). With almost all of the most-wanted films already out on the format, what's left for DVD consumers to want? Why, TV Shows, of course!
So therefore, as you can see from the above chart, there have been more and more TV-on-DVD news each month (with a few seasonal dips here and there), as studios announce more and more product all the time. Customers in retail stores like Best Buy, Target, and Wal-Mart have certainly noticed that TV-DVDs are more prominent these days, with season sets grouped together in very visible locations. This past month saw more TV-on-DVD news than ever before: 236 news posts, beating the old record from July 2004 handily (196 stories), and averaging 7.76 news posts per day.
In fact, so much news has passed through our site that we haven't had a day off of news since October 11, 2003. Every day, including weekends and holidays, we post news here. Sleep? What's that?
With so many stories to have been posted, many of our enthusiastic readers are to be thanked for sharing info and tipping us off to things we may have overlooked. We try to thank each and every one of them - in the story, by name if they'll let us. We can't thank all of you enough! In fact, we hate it every time we have to turn away an over-enthusiastic reader who forgets that we only post news for Region 1 (including cover art, which may or may not be the same in Region 1: North America as it is in Region 2: Europe...but we can't take the chance that it will change). We also regret that we have to focus only on episodic television, and skip over (with very rare exceptions) news about one-shot specials or telefilms. And we've given up on most anime, with the only items we cover (and completely at our discretion) being anime shows that have made the transition into "classic American TV". Examples would include
Speed Racer, Voltron and the original
Transformers. We would love to cover more, but we just don't have the time! We've averaged 5 news posts per day here at TVShowsOnDVD for the past year-and-a-half, and recently it's gotten to be even more than that. Several days recently we had so much news on one day that the front page - which holds the 15 most recent news stories - has been cleared of the previous days' news stories. Wowee!
With all that news, you must be wondering which shows get the brunt of it. Sometimes Gord and I get accused of only posting news about our own favorites. But a quick look at the top list of news-getting programs will easily prove that what we mostly talk about are, well, mostly YOUR favorites. Especially those of your favorites that see a lot of releases, and therefore a lot of news to go along with them:
- 1st Place:
- 2nd Place (tied):
- I Love Lucy
- The Twilight Zone
(1959)
- 3rd Place (tied):
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Garfield and Friends
- Seinfeld
- Smallville
- South Park
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
(2003)
Yeah,
Turtles is on there! In fact, it will get another news post today...and so will
Garfield. But
Seinfeld fans shouldn't worry about these kidvids pulling ahead of your favorite show: we'll guarantee you news about Seasons 5 and 6 no later than a week from tomorrow. As for other popular shows:
Charmed and
Alias are tied for 5th place in news posts, with
Friends and
X-Files sharing 6th place.
It's a very exciting time in the TV-on-DVD news business. Gord is interviewed regularly for articles in big-name publications, including
USA Today and
The Hollywood Reporter. According to statistics at the Alexa website rating service, we're the #1 TV-on-DVD news site in the world, and in a virtual tie with DVDTalk as the #1 website for North American DVD news. We're just a couple of guys who do this for fun, in our spare time, when we're not earning a living elsewhere to pay the bills. What makes us successful? YOU DO, our readers. THANK YOU, VERY MUCH! Stay tuned for lots more news, because we've got lots to tell you.
