The good thing about DVD is that studios are pulling out all sorts of series and offering boxed sets of full runs. The price per season on a show may initially be $25-40 but sometimes there is a blowout (think remaindered bookstores) where you can get full seasons of things like Peter Gunn for $12.
Why pay $50 a month for cable to watch something like TV Land? When Viacom moved syndicated shows to cable, people were paying for the exact content (WITH commercials) that used to be free.
Buy it and just watch it at your leisure. The question then comes up, would you watch some of these series if you had to actively select each episode? I'm not asking that about either of these series, more specifically that is about things like "Saved By The Bell" or "Sanford and Son".
When tv ceases to be "background noise" how much do some of the old reruns hold up? And would you watch some of these series several times?
What I'd like to be able to do is "upload" the content of several tv discs to a DVR at my home and watch an episode of this, an episode of this, and maybe a movie...
When you have to remember which episodes you've already watched (and some series like Rocky & Bullwinkle have longrunning continuity), it can be a hassle to keep popping in and out DVDs to watch a 25 minute show (especially when you can't fast forward through opening Disc titles/production credits/copyright notices, etc.).
It's good to have tv for brekaing news but now it isn't uncommon for Fox affiliates to switch to Fox News coverage for hours at a time or another network to pull in something like CNN. And those aren't great news sources anyway (basically I would turn to them for live video coverage but not care anything about the announcer yammering away).
But to take this back to the original comment. DVD means that you can watch a series like Danger Man/Secret Agent Man, The Prisoner, or Twilight Zone even if no network in your viewing area are carrying them.
And there are lots of obscure series coming out on DVD. Even more if you have a region free player and can buy British DVDs.
You may get to see One Step Beyond someday yet. Even if they aren't great, they would have a different (yet similar) feel to the TZ and OL series you may already have seen every episode of.
Oh, man -- the Prisoner!
I had forgotten that show.
*MUST* go to hunt that down, can't believe I haven't thought of that in years.
I'm dreaming of a day it's all stored on a hard-drive somewhere and availabe 'on-demand'.