Amazon.com

The other day, I decided to get the Adventure Time Season 1 DVD. Yeah, I know what I said, but lacking suitable alternatives meant that I’m left with little choice. In the course of browsing to purchase it, I was struck by Amazon’s misguided pricing policy when it comes to cartoons. See the screenshot below:

See something kinda funny there? Yup, why buy the digital version for more than it cost for the physical discs! That simply can’t make any sense, can it? I mean for one, DVDs have to be made, shipped to Amazon, stored and then shipped to me. The digital copy gets uploaded to their servers once and then gets streamed/downloaded as necessary. The worst part about that? I’m paying half the delivery cost; the bandwidth!

Now someone is apt to say that with the digital copy, I can watch it on multiple devices and in multiple locations but of course DVDs are easy to rip and once they are, they are just as portable, if not more so due to the DRM on Amazon’s digital files.

So I was curious, my interest was decidedly piqued; were other cartoon series’ priced similarly or was this just a naked attempt to cash in on Adventure Times success? Let’s have a look-see.

Here’s a few of the better deals:

And here’s a few of the more egregious ones:

It should be noted that The Hub has no series’ on DVD in their entirety yet and the Disney Channel is sticking firmly with DVD for now. I also left out some shows like Avatar: the Last Airbender and Rocko’s Modern Life because they are available on Netflix and Amazon’s own streaming service for free.

So who’s losing out here? Is it Amazon because they’re selling less digital versions? Hardly, you can be sure those digital sales are almost 100% profit for them. Do studios lose? Again, not likely. They make a profit on the DVDs at those prices so you can be sure they make a profit once they cut out the manufacturing and distribution and whack up the price.

So if they don’t lose, then who does?

Us consumers obviously! And sadly, they way things are going, those DVD sets will start to go away and you can be sure that those digital prices are not going to budge one bit.