• Where are all the Blu-ray TV show releases?

    Matt Burns

    Matt is a Senior Editor at TechCrunch. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is TechCrunch. He learned the retail side of... → Learn More

    Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

    The vast majority of TV shows produced over the last few years have been filmed in high definition. Even if the channel didn’t have a HD station at the time, the show was still probably shot in HD. So where are all the Blu-ray releases of these shows? 

    Think about it. The show was shot in HD, Blu-ray can hold a crap-ton of these episodes all on one disc and the Blu-ray format could use the shot in the arm.  

    I have never bought a TV show season DVD set for the very fact that 99% of them are not available in HD. Why would I want to re-watch The Office in standard definition when I original enjoyed it in glorious HD?  But I would totally re-watch a good amount of shows if they were available on Blu-ray: Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, Heroes, you know, the nerdy shows with great eye candy. There are currently a couple – 13 TV seperate seasons by my count – available, but by no means enough.

    Since Blu-ray’s capacity is massive, it would only make since that an entire season could fit on one or two discs. It might not be cost effective at this point because I can only imagine standard DVDs bulk production costs are next to nothing compared to Blu-rays, but the format as a whole could use the shelve space bump and customer recognition.

    You have to wonder if there was suddenly a massive surge of Blu-ray titles, how it would affect sales. Right now, the format is struggling and seems to be on the verge of living a Laserdisc-type life, but perhaps if the format breaks into a different genre like TV shows, it will broaden the format’s appeal and sell better. There are so many HDTV shows out there, why not bring these out on a HD medium like Blu-ray and show the consumer that this format has a future.

    Then again, maybe physical media is dying altogether. 

     

     

     

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