Yup. Any future upgrade of DS9 would probably be a restoration of non effects sequences with film negatives, and a simple upconvert and clean up of the image of effects scenes... it will look like hell, but it can be done for a fraction of the cost.
I don't think there would be a market for poorly converted blurays. once you're going to take from the original negatives; it just makes sense to go the whole nine yards and align the quality for everything. otherwise if they do anything at all it"ll be an upscale of the 480i videotape.
Enterprise was released with the original HD scans combined with upscaled effects footage. There's already a precedent there.
We are not talking about buying an episode one at a time (which Amazon also offers), but monthly subscribtion services. The master tapes, are probably already on a digital video format, and should always stay in good condition, if good care is taken. Besides various copies of the broadcast versions exist at various broadcasters and video services. You are using digital as an umbrella for 2 very different things. Video (and audio) files storing the images on the one hand, and scene files, that describe a 3D scene or model on the other hand. Digital video formats are standardized and well documented. As long as the files are taken care of with backups, etc. , they are in no danger of becoming unavailable or unusable. The same can be said for modern 3D models. Most stuff is well documented, and standardized. But back in the time of DS9, CGI was like a wild west, without many standards, and without caring, that the work can be preserved and recreated. So yeah, that work was in danger. But in no way that means, that digital is in greater risk than film stock. That would be wrong on various levels.
As we've already seen there's little market for blu-ray season sets for Trek to begin with. I'm talking strictly from an upscaling for streaming and future broadcast on TV standpoint. I doubt we will ever see DS9 or Voyager on blu as the format will be dead before CBS makes the decision to remaster.
We do have to keep the readability of digital media in mind, however the new Domesday Book is a particularly bad example. They used a format that was not widely used even at the time. I work in a library, and we have many types of media: CDs, audio cassette, reel-to-reel tape, digital audio tape, 33 and 78 RPM vinyl, DVDs, VHS tape, Umatic tape, 3 1/2 inch and 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. All of these still have working equipment to read them (although it may need to be gotten out of the closet). All of them predate the bizarre format they chose for the Domesday Book project.
From physical deterioration no, but from obsolescence of format yes. Read that 2nd article I linked to.
FYI: I did some more digging in the last few days and discovered that the 2011 CBS/Netflix deal was worth around $200 million for "dozens" of classic shows (probably around 2,700 total episodes like the similar CBS/HULU deal the following year). The deal was for two years and has been updated and renewed twice, in 2013 and 2015. That would put the average price per episode for the Netflix deal at roughly $75,000 (again, this is a ballpark figure, just a back of the envelope calculation to shed some light on what these things are worth). The CBS/Amazon deal that same year (2011) was valued at around $100 million for 2,000 episodes. The average per episode there would be roughly $50,000 (it's terms were slightly different having to do with the number of Prime subscribers and it was only for 18 months). Either way, it breaks down to about $3,000 per month, per TV episode. So, extrapolating from that, you'd expect a series like TNG to be worth somewhere in the vicinity of $9 million to $13.5 million every time CBS renews one of these deals. So I was definitely wrong to say they were worth "hundreds of thousands per episode." It's more like tens of thousands. But, all things considered, I wasn't really that far off from $100,000. In all of the press releases I found, the various Star Trek series are always singled out for mention in the deal. That's no surprise as CBS chief Les Moonves has been quoted as saying Star Trek "works exceedingly well" in their streaming deals. Since 2011, CBS has increased its back catalog of available episodes to around 5,300 which they offer on their own streaming service and have continued to license to Netflix, Amazon, and HULU in two-year increments. The Netflix deal is currently worth "hundreds of millions per year" according to a recent quote by Les Moonves, so it has roughly doubled in value since 2011, along with the amount of content offered.
I read the part of the article you quoted, and I argue against it in my response you quoted. The formats are well documented, so they are in danger of being lost. You can go and read up on all of them right now. Obsolescence is no issue here, because the basic video formats are still the same, and modern software can handle them. In the case of DS9 the problem is, that nobody took care of documenting and preserving the 3D model data for some of the CGI. But that isn't an issue inherit to digital formats. Some good finds. And thanks to you quoting my previous response I glimpsed an error I mad, by omitting the word "not". I meant to say: The money TNG got from that deal, can NOT be counted towards TNG-R, only part of it. How much money would TNG have made, if it were only in SD? And more importantly. How much more would DS9 be worth, if it were in HD?
I wish we can get a ds9 documentary series for Netflix if we don't get blu rays. I loved the behind the scenes stuff for TNG and we don't have nearly enough for DS9 or Voyager.
I was watching an earlier season of Doctor Who (Tennant-season) on Netflix, in what is the HD quality for those earlier seasons.... and if they ever do a simple remaster like they did for those seasons on DS9, count me out. After the quality of the later seasons of Who, I forgot how horrible those earlier HD-seasons looked. Especially CGI shots. And with such a huge amount of CGI in DS9, it will look like shit. So no, I'll stick to my dvds. Just check your settings on your tv and player if need be. You can turn a lot of the upscaling and enhancing off, and it'll look a lot better.
Doctor Who was not recorded in HD until the last Tennant specials following series four. Everything before that was good old digibeta.
The problem I've found with upscaling the existing DVDs is that the nature of DS9 and VOY, being shot on film and then transfered to videotape for editing, means there's a generation of quality lost to begin with. There isn't a Blu Ray player in the land that can upscale that and get rid of it's naturally muddy look. The benefit that a native upscale project would have IMHO is in them being able to digitally regrade the picture. So, while it may not have the added definition of going back to the source like TNG-R did, they *could* fiddle around the edges with the broadcast copies to give them a richer color palette, slightly sharpen the definition, play around with the contrast, put them out there without the compression artifacts they've got on the DVD versions, etc etc. Even that kind of 'minimal workload' would still present us with a better overall product than is currently available on the DVD sets.
Everyone can play with contrast, color, sharpness, brightness by just adjusting it on the TV. And every good BD player (f.e. Panasonic 500 or 700 or an Oppo player) does upscale DVDs mostly as good as CBS did it with that missing film elements for the TNG Blu ray release. There's nothing CBS could do, that we can't do by ourselves, apart from getting rid of some artifacts, which one barely notices, given the right amount of distance between you and the screen. No, that doesn't justify the effort of a DS9 BD release to me, i'm sorry.
But would you pay $400 for it? Sure as we all know at some point the series would plummet in price, but the studio want people buying it upfront at full whack. I probably wouldn't bother for, well, not even as much as half a job. I'd probably wait until it came on the streaming services. Of course, in the UK DS9 isn't streaming anywhere at the minute, or any other Trek, its obviously considered unpopular.
Right, you mean the upscales that are floating around. They just got a blu-ray release here, and I was tempted by the series one set. I still have the DVDs in that enormous Tardis cube box from the original release in 2005. If the price is right I might get it just for saving space if nothing else. Though I don't expect an improvement in picture quality.
Thrte is, and I'm proof ! Having purchased none of the Trek shows before on any format, they've now fallen in price enough to attract me. I've recently purchased the complete Voyager DVD box for £45 new. I'd have preferred a Bluray, even if it was an upscale and would have paid a little more - up to about £70ish. For those of us without the earlier releases, even a marginal (uncompressed) version would be attractive. It's unlikely to please the suits though, not at those prices.