Why haven't some older videos been re-released?

[Drtooth]

Uh, preservation? You said so yourself regarding another show in another thread, often times clips online are fuzzy, grainy, snowy, taped-off-TV recordings. Heck, even when clips are posted online from source material, they have to be compressed to conserve webspace and bandwidth anyway.

Personally, I agree to that, but I'm thinking from a business standpoint. I really don't think SW or WB (especially WB) think of collectors market DVD's unless they release Old School compilation sets. I give them all the credit in the world for putting some of the older DVD/VHS footage on newer releases as bonus features, but at the end of the day, all they want to release is the more profitable "Elmo's Such and Such" type videos. That's why we only had one release of Bert and Ernie Claymation cartoons, and two volumes of Elmo the Musical (though you could fit the entire collection on one disk, they just rushed the first one to market for obvious reasons). It's a real shame they don't think collectors would be interested in rereleases of older DTV projects. It would be great to see them compiled into collections, but again, while the collectors would pay money for physical media to own and collect, it doesn't warrant enough profit to make more releases like that. Even then, that's provided they don't have to re-clear rights to anything. And that's usually a hold up.

By all means, I'm very mixed on streaming. YT videos can be pulled by a company on a whim (or in some cases, false claims or even some small European country had the distribution rights and or airing rights at some point in the 90's or something), legal streaming sites have backdoor deals and therefore you can't count on them to have rights to something forever. And my personal favorite, the internet can go down. I think we should have streaming and physical media along side each other, but the general public gets all cheap and just buys a couple subscriptions to see a movie a couple times rather than buy a physical disk to collect. There are those who prefer internet viewing, and I can't blame them, but I'd rather collect the merchandise and hold it in my hand. Just money gets in the way of that most of the time. I really think it would be great to release some classic DTV Sesame projects somewhere, but SW and WB seem to care more about "shut the kids up for an hour" releases. Though I'm glad SW has been pretty good about things being online so far.