Dinah Shore show Nov 9, 1958

[Steve Hoffman]

Originally Posted by Phil Nelson

I suspect that Steve's right. Their customer list is big kahunas like PBS, The Tonight Show, and the like. Small fry like you and me probably aren't worth their time, streaming or not.

Also, these guys are more like middlemen. They market and restore content, but they don't own it. Here's a piece of fine print from one of their pages:

"Research Video Inc. is an authorized agency with exclusive representation rights for over 100 television programs, TV series, private film collections and video footage archives on behalf of the official copyright holders and original producers."

So, if you want DVDs of all the old Flip Wilson shows, you can hire them as an agent to negotiate with the rights owners, but they can't just toss all that content up on Amazon or Youtube.

Phil Nelson

It's even more complicated than that. The musicians in the orchestra would all have to be paid again. Renegotiated with the union. Each of the guest stars' estates would have to be paid again, royalty fees would have to be worked out with legal, etc.

I'm tellin' ya, a nightmare. I had a long meeting with the late Andy Williams about putting 40 of his best shows out on DVD in 2000, complete, commercials, NBC peacock, everything. Andy signed off on the deal. The nightmare of clearances worked out to the sad realization that we would have lost money on each and every DVD sold. Just can't be done..