The videotape situation has absolutely *zip* to do with the Turner
situation. We got a reading on this from WB long, long before the Turner
deal was even a glimmer in Wall Street's eye. Basically, it's an in-house
problem. Most of the studios have a philosophy of, "If someone's going to
do something with one of our shows, we should do it through an internal
branch of the company." But if they themselves don't want to do it, they
tend to hold onto it even if someone else wants to do it NOW on the theory
that they themselves MIGHT want to do it in future.

It's a territorial thing. We have the right to do this, and we won't
surrender that right, because our division refuses to lose that control,
whether we actually ever do the project or not.

This is, remember, a business where people running studios pay vast
amounts of money for things they know they'll never do. It's always less
about money than about pride, jurisdiction and control.

In our case, "proper channels" for B5 would be Warner Home Video. Unlike
Fox and Paramount, WHB doesn't generally release TV series on video. They
tend to look more to big-deal movies, documentaries and miniseries. And
they tend to do the big-ticket items that they know will sell millions of
copies (like the Batman movie, and some of the animation stuff, which has
a different agenda). They look at a syndicted show, and shrug.

Warners International, on the other hand, is by their mandate set up to
handle the release of whole series on tape, and that aspect wasn't a
problem in the UK.

So we've been negotiating with them for almost 2 years now to do the
videos ourselves. There's been some movement, gradually, but it's been
the kind of movement associated with glaciers. Eventually we'll get
there; we just have to keep saying "yes you will" one more time than they
can say "no we won't."


jms