Commercial Releases

The Doctor Who home video market had in fact already been attacked prior to the 1983 release of Tom Baker's Cyberman story, when Walton Sound and Film Services released the Peter Cushing movies at £133 (around £553 today). 8mm film works by passing a series of images past a light-projector at high speed.

This format was standard the world over, but was highly costly and too delicate to ever be a major player in the home video world.

By the late 70s, two formats had emerged, promising durable home re-recording ability, and low cost duplication for professional releases: VHS (pictured left) and Betamax (pictured right). They battled it out over several years, and eventually VHS (lower quality but also substantially cheaper) won out.


The format was based around the varying TV standards that had developed over the past several decades around the world:

Although VHS tapes all looked similar – a reel of magnetic tape being passed by a series of "heads" which read off the audio and video information separately – the NTSC/PAL/SECAM divide ensured that the speed (and therefore the number of frames per second) and the amount of pixels (ie the resolution) differed - making it impossible to play back videos manufactured in certain countries on another country's machinary, without the extra expense of built-in converters (which, certainly in PAL and SECAM countries, became the norm by the 1990s).

Releases in the UK were handled directly by BBC Worldwide (previously known as BBC Enterprises). Starting with a simultaneous release in 1983 of Revenge of the Cybermen on VHS (right), Betamax and Laserdisc in omnibus format with a fairly basic photomontage cover, these were quickly cut down to just VHS and Betamax after the release of The Brain of Morbius in 1985 (oddly in a heavily-cut repeat version). After another 11 releases (during which time the Betamax format was dropped) the releases became unedited (apart from the final cliffhangers on the final episodes of many Hartnell stories), and beginning with The War Games (left) gained beautiful cover illustrations by Alistair Pearson, Colin Howard and Andrew Skilleter (and one or two other guest artists). Most of the 80s omnibus releases were also reissued during 1993-4 in uncut format, although The Seeds of Death, The Time Warrior and The Talons of Weng-Chiang would have to wait for their DVD releases to be seen episodically.

The VHS releases took a break during 1996 in order to push the TV Movie (right), and were relaunched with The Leisure Hive (right) in 1997 with a redesigned cover format (initially with art by Colin Howard, but later more photomontages by design company Black Sheep), baring the infamous Industria font and an altered version of the TVM logo, and continued apace until the final release in 2003. The first few videos featured a specially made advert (below-left).

Until 1994, Australian distribution was handled by Polygram (and, for the first few releases, Kerridge Odeon who were subcontracted to distribute to New Zealand). With a few exceptions these generally tailed the UK releases by just a few months. In 1994, they elected not to reissue the omnibus versions as BBC Worldwide were doing, and by the end of 1996 the rights were transferred to Roadshow. Following a flurry of releases, Roadshow caught up once more with the British releases in early 1999, and finished in 2004. Covers were usually copied from the UK versions, but Australia elected to stick with the diamond logo when the UK switched to the TVM version in 1996.

In 1986, CBS/Fox gained the rights from BBC Worldwide Americas to distribute NTSC versions of the videos. Catching up quickly with the UK videos, they then followed around half a year behind the releases. Initially considering Doctor Who to be a children's series, they were released under the 'Playhouse' banner, and like PolyGram, Fox chose not to reissue the early omnibus releases.

In 1994, Hollywood Online joined forces with Fox to offer a free floppy disc with purchases of The Aztecs, Terminus, Robot, City of Death, Resurrection of the Daleks and Planet of the Spiders – this promotional item is available to download here (2.25mb).

In early 2000 the rights were lost, and by the end of the year Warner Home Video took over. Over the next few years, they slowly cleared the backlog created over the year, and also continued distribution (with their own catalogue numbers) of new runs of all the old CBS/Fox releases. By 2004 they too had completed the range.

Between 1983 and 1986, three releases ("Saibaman-no Gyakushyuu", "Kasei-no Piramiddo" and "Shi-no Robotto") of Tom Baker stories appeared on the Pony Video label in Japan (using the NTSC video format, compatible with US releases), with added subtitles. These were apparently released in order to help sell the show to major Japanese TV station NHK. No releases followed until NHK ran a subtitled version of the TV Movie in 1997, which was subsequently released by CiC on VHS and Laserdisc. The TV Movie and the 60s Cushing movies have also been released in a variety of countries and languages, and Pyramids of Mars has also received a Finnish release. Details are on the individual pages.

Also emerging in the late 70s and early 80s was the infamous laserdisc format. With quality slightly better than that of VHS and Betamax, and at a much cheaper price (Revenge was released at £10 – around £23 today), the format came just a little too late, after many home users and duplication companies had already invested in either VHS or Betamax. Although it trundled along quite successfully with AV enthusiasts throughout the 80s and 90s, it was eventually declared dead in the late 90s with the release of DVD.

Laserdiscs were 12" discs (the same size as vinyl albums at the time) and the information was picked up by spinning the disc past a laser, which slowly moved from the outside-in. Because of the manufacturing method, they were relatively durable and could be cleaned easily, but could not be recorded onto at home.

BBC Video released two Laserdiscs (Revenge and The Brain of Morbius) in 1983/4, CBS Fox released The Five Doctors and Day of the Daleks in 1991/2 in the US, Encore Entertainment released Day of the Daleks, The Ark in Space and Terror of the Zygons between 1996 and 1998 in the UK, and in 1997 Kuraray issued the TV Movie in China. As with video, these were all subject to the PAL/NTSC divide.

In the late 80s, a number of similar formats (ultimately all under the VCD banner) cropped up, in an attempt to revitalise the flagging disc-based home video format, which Laserdisc was lazily dominating. This was based on exactly the same concept as the Laserdisc format, except the discs were just 5" (as were CDs, allowing for easy duplication in existing CD factories, and home recording using the growing CDR format that allowed "burning" in home PCs) and a new compression method – MPEG1 – allowed for near-Laserdisc quality on a much smaller disc. MPEG1 automatically examined areas of the screen on each frame that were similar, and grouped together the picture information, allowing for entire frames of images to be represented by a much smaller amount of data. As with VHS and Laserdisc, VCD too followed the PAL/SECAM/NTSC separation. As VHS was really in its stride by the time of VCDs launch, it never got a grip on the market and only lasted a couple of years, with even Laserdisc lasting longer.

Doctor Who was never officially released on VCD, although a couple of promo discs were released far after the official death of the format, when DVD was in its early stages.

The major format of the late 20th and early 21st century. Once more using 5" discs, but this time with brand new technology that allowed smaller "grooves" in the disc, and two "layers" (with the laser refocussing after it had got to the end of one layer and starting to work its way backwards through the second). It also supported the MPEG2 format, which took MPEG1 to the next level by introducing temporal compression – each frame would be compared to the previous one, to see what information could be copied across. Where VCD very badly fitted a film into 650mb, a dual layer DVD could fit a film onto 9gb with ease – often alternate audio tracks would be used not for foreign soundtracks, but for those originally involved to provide a full-length commentary, and subtitles would be used to provide a technical commentary, usually written by a fan. Bonus features could also be included on the discs – some of these would take the form of Easter Eggs, where a complex series of button pushes on the menu would reveal a hidden area to be clicked on, leading the user to further bonus features. Doctor Who was finally able to be presented in a way that matched the quality of the master tapes – no further enhancements in technology would be able to improve on the quality of the 1963-89 series, and this is strongly expected to be the last release of these episodes.

As with previous home formats, PAL/NTSC/SECAM is still an issue, but also all discs are coded with a region number. This was intended to cut down on imports, although almost all DVD players would eventually be easily hackable to be region free. Nonetheless, those with locked DVD players are not able to import across the region borders...

The UK range was initially produced and released by BBC Worldwide. Their first batch of six DVD releases in November 1999 included the special edition version of The Five Doctors (left), and beginning in November 2000, the range itself (with a new cover style – initially featuring a basic image of the enemy in the centre, but later including photomontages by Clayton Hickman, later joined by Lee Binding) started with The Robots of Death. Shortly before 2005's release of Revelation of the Daleks, BBCWW merged with rival VCI and began releasing discs under the banner of 2Entertain.

Tailing the UK releases by a few months, Roadshow makes new pressings of the UK discs, along with slightly altered covers to allow for the Australian censor banner.

Around a year after the UK releases, Warner Home Video creates NTSC masters of the UK releases and sometimes adds their own bonus features. The covers are entirely redesigned and The Five Doctors: Special Edition was released with the same cover layout as part of their first block of 3 Doctor Who DVDs.

 

UK DVD (1999-Sep 2004)	UK DVD (Nov 2004-date)	Australasian DVD	US DVD

By the early 2000s, mobile phones and PDAs were gaining in technology to the point where they could handle lengthy videos. A number of competing formats are still battling it out, but The Five Doctors has already been released by Rok on a mobile platform.

For their 2005-released handheld gaming platform, the PSP, Sony created a special cartridge format entitled "UMD", to release both games and movies onto. These are a 1.5" silver DVD-type disc held in a protective caddy (left), that shares the region encoding that DVD does, but uses the newer MPEG4 compression method. 2Entertain released the 2005 and 2006 seasons onto this format (mirroring the content of the "vanilla" releases), although flagging sales across the UMD range have made 2Entertain discontinue the Doctor Who range in this format.

A new high-definition format (briefly competing with HD-DVD, which died out in early 2008) enabling around five times the picture quality of traditional DVD and uncompressed audio. Regular DVD does, however, get all the information possible out of PAL video, so the only Doctor Who releases likely to benefit would be of the film-sourced Peter Cushing movies, or Torchwood, which was taped using HD cameras and as such was never aired in its full resolution (HD cameras, and Blu-Ray discs, support 1080 lines of resolution - the Torchwood broadcasts on BBC-HD display 'just' 720 lines).

With the rise of iTunes and other legal mp3 download stores, the world is beginning to develop towards a culture of downloadable media and TV-on-demand, removing the necessity for physical media entirely. TME will never fully cover Doctor Who's availability like this, as it will simply be a matter of what services have the right contracts in place with the BBC at any given time. However it should be noted that the first people to manage it were Amazon US, who launched their 'Unbox' service on 9th September 2006. Along with numerous films and American TV shows, the service initially offered The Aztecs, The Tomb of the Cybermen (Parts 1 and 3-4 only), The Mind Robber, The Seeds of Death, Spearhead from Space, The Three Doctors, The Ark in Space, Pyramids of Mars, The Robots of Death, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Horror of Fang Rock (Parts 1 and 3-4 only), The Pirate Planet, The Power of Kroll (Parts 1-3 only), The Visitation, The Caves of Androzani, Vengeance on Varos, Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric. All of these were available on DVD in the US by this point.

 

The following grabs help to illustrate the subtle differences between the original DVD releases and the Unbox wmvs, which are of a distinctly bluer hue and framed slightly differently.

The example specs here, for the first episode of The Robots of Death, give a more detailed insight: WMV DVD Video/Audio 466mb 1.22gb Duration 0:24:07 0:24:07 Type ASF MPG Quality 81% 83% Video 433mb 1.13mb Bitrate 2511kbps 9000kbps FPS 21.113 29.970 Resolution 640x480 720x480 Codec WVC1 MPEG2 Audio 32mb 33.1mb Bitrate 191kpbs 192kbps Frequency 48000hz 48000hz Channels 2 1 Codec WMA AC3 DVM

This guide includes details of every viewing made by the British Board of Film Classification when considering what certificates to grant Doctor Who videos and DVDs.

	UNIVERSAL Suitable for all.
	PARENTAL GUIDANCE General viewing, but some scenes may be unsuitable for young children.
	12 Suitable only for persons of 12 years and over.

There are also five other ratings (E, Uc, 15, 18 and R18, but these have yet to be used on a BBC Doctor Who release - a number of Reeltime and BBV's documentary DVDs have made use of the 'E', exempt from classification, rating).

Some interesting notes are as follows: Firstly, that if a DVD spine falls below 2cm, it need not display the certificate. Until Clayton Hickman's designs (see above), this clause was not made use of. Audio commentaries do not need to be submitted, but the BBFC recommends to its clients that they do so if they believe it might alter the classification (the Restoration Team have so far been careful to ensure that the commentaries do not). During August 2001, the BBFC suggested to all its clients that should a bonus or menu increase the rating (as it did on the November 2000 release The Robots Of Death) they add the suggested phrase "Overall category raised to [15] due to additional material being classified at a higher certificate than the main feature [12]." The images used for the certificates were redesigned by the BBFC in late 2002, with releases from The Seeds Of Death onwards sporting new logos.

Whilst America does indeed have a classification system, it only applies to cinema releases of films, and so all Doctor Who videos are unclassified.

The Australian releases are all certified in a similar fashion by the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Doctor Who releases are all classified as 'G' (suitable for all ages) or 'PG' (parental guidance recommended for persons under 15 years. Generally these follow the same pattern as the 'U' and 'PG' certificates in the UK, but not always. Also, any video classified 'PG' also comes with a reason for that certificate. The 1996 TV Movie is an exception in that it received a 'M15+' category (recommended for mature audiences of 15 years and over). More recently, the Office rolled 'M+15' into 'MA+15' and introduced the newer 'M' classification. No release has yet gone beyond these ratings, although another three exist (R18+, X18+ and RC).

For further information on the classification systems in either country, we refer you to the BBFC website (http://www.bbfc.co.uk) and the OFLC site (http://www.oflc.gov.au), the latter of which has an excellent downloadable file regarding its stance on various issues.

The Region Two DVDs are also specially passed for Irish release, and include their own logos on the discs themselves. In Ireland, they are then sold with exactly the same covers, but with a sticker over the British certificate displaying the ROI version. For further details visit: www.justice.ie. The Irish government does not publicly list its certification decisions, so no details appear here, but generally they are in line with the UK decisions.