TVShowsOnDVD.com

» see tvshowsondvd.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

TVShowsOnDVD.com existed to answer one question. When is this show coming out on disc, and if it is not coming out, what is the holdup. Gord Lacey put the site up on 1 November 2001, back when buying a television season in a box was new enough that nobody had a list of what existed. By the end it held more than eight thousand releases and the studios were linking to it themselves.

The work was unglamorous and there was a lot of it. Somebody had to read every announcement and check the street dates each time one slipped. David Lambert did most of the news writing. The site also tracked the thing collectors cared about most and that nobody else was recording anywhere: which releases had arrived altered, with the original music swapped out because the licensing had not carried over from broadcast to home video.

It changed hands twice without changing shape. TV Guide bought it on 15 February 2007, and when TV Guide's website went to CBS Interactive in March 2013 the database went along as an asset. For eleven more years the same two people kept updating it under corporate ownership, which is the part that reads strangest now.

The catalog it kept was region 1. A DVD player bought in Turkey was region 2, and the local shelf for television box sets was thin to the point of not being a shelf. What I remember from that period is the format rather than the market: discs were how a season moved from one person to another. The list of what had officially been pressed was an American document about an American shelf, and it took a particular kind of collector to need it.

~ the record ~

~ the voting page ~

The feature that made it more than a calendar was the voting. Every series had a page, including the ones that had never been released, and you could register that you wanted it. That turned a database of what existed into a record of what people were waiting for, which is a different and much rarer thing. In early November 2005 the site was pulling over seventy-five thousand visitors a day, and studio home-video divisions had an open line to it.

Alongside that ran a standing FAQ under the heading of what the holdup was, explaining why particular shows were stuck. Usually the answer was music rights. Sometimes it was a rights holder who had split the catalog between two companies who would not talk. The site was one of the few places that wrote those reasons down in public rather than leaving fans to guess.

~ the two dates ~

Most write-ups give 25 May 2018 as the shutdown, and the archive does not agree. The last working capture of the front page is 15 May 2018. From 17 May the bare domain was already redirecting to a page called offline.html, and that page carried the farewell. Whatever was announced on the 24th or the 25th, the site itself had been gone for a week by then.

The note is short and signed by Lacey. "Today, we are taking TVShowsOnDVD.com permanently offline and moving exclusively to publishing on social media." It thanks readers for catching up on the news while sipping coffee, or just checking on the status of a few favorite shows. Then two links, one to Twitter and one to Facebook, and that was the end of sixteen years of records.

~ what went with it ~

The news survived the site for a while. Lambert kept posting to the Facebook page until July 2022, when it moved to a paid newsletter on Substack. What did not survive was the database. Eight thousand release records with their dates and their reasons for not existing were taken down in one move and were not published anywhere else. The domain does not resolve at all now.

It is a strange thing to lose a reference work about a dead format, but that is what happened. The market it documented was already collapsing by 2018 and the site outlived most of the studios' television-on-disc programs. The last useful thing it did was keep track of an era while that era was still shipping.

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