But it does prevent exactly that. It costs money to do the conversion. Costs must be offset by revenue, and of course if revenue is involved in business, there must be enough revenue to generate profit. And if the legal agreements with the talent don't allow anything other than VHS sales and rentals, then it's not worth the effort to convert.
Guess you have a point there. I'm thinking way too much from a 'good for the world' POV. So only thing we can do is start a 'closed off' site which connects people interested in this, so we can coordinate buying of DVDs for 'personal' use from studio's (as I said before, I tried that in NL, BE and FR and they are willing to accomodate for high prices) and then copy them for interested parties. Yes, i'm advocating copying here, but how else to force them to digitize them? What can be done?
On a slightly related topic; HN (and Reddit) is FULL with domain experts; where are the people who work at these studios and television makers? Do they actually ever come here? Why don't they chime in ever? I would love to have a discussion with people working in the industry. They seem to be so focused on money that they don't want to hear reason, so I would definitely like to know if all management thinks like that for instance.
And slightly related to that last part:
In the Netherlands we have this idiot who is the ceo of Brein which is the Dutch anti piracy organisation; he sometimes does some comments or interviews, but he just quits after he is torpedoed down as the guy knows nothing. (And probably cannot do anything either tbh.) But one of the things he can never answer is; 'people will pay for anything, if you make it easy; as long as BitTorrent is 100x faster/easier than going the legal route, people will download illegally'. Must be industry people who have some ideas about that.
