The Ballad of Blu-ray - A Cinephile Takes Stock - NYTimes.com
“When VHS arrived, the format was forgiving enough to allow the studios to transfer many of their titles to tape directly from the video masters they had already made for television distribution. Many of those titles disappeared in the transition to DVD because studios felt that more obscure films wouldn’t be profitable enough to justify striking new prints and preparing new digital transfers.
As a result huge swaths of our film heritage have vanished. After 10 years of DVD the studios seem to have concluded that all the films that will make money in home video have already been released; that number is a very small percentage of their output. Turner Classic Movies online says that of the 162,984 films listed in its database (based on the authoritative AFI Catalog), only 5,980 (3.67 percent) are available on home video.”
