And I really must quibble with this notion of having to "pay twice" for BritBox, as if that were somehow a rip-off. I don't think people have any idea of how complicated and expensive it is to release an archived programme for additional viewing.
Some might find it instructive to have a look at the
Doctor Who Restoration Team website and see some of the processes involved in restoring an old show. For example:
- "Doctor Who" was often shot using a mixture of video and 16mm film. In some cases the original film stock survives as well as the video tape of the entire episode; here, the film is scanned and digitised, which gives a significant boost to picture quality for the filmed scenes. (And the serial "Spearhead from Space" was actually remastered into HD and released on blu ray).
- Old TV shows were sometimes archived by being transferred to film - often simply by pointing a film camera at a monitor during broadcast. This results in what was originally a 50Hz interlaced video image being compressed down to a 25FPS progressive one. The team created a technique (”VidFIRE") which reverses that process.
- Some "Doctor Who" episodes were converted from PAL to NTSC (badly) and the original PAL versions lost. The team developed a technique for back-converting to PAL which significantly improves the picture.
- In cases where a colour episode was preserved only on black and white film, what was originally an unwanted side effect of the chroma information in the signal appearing as high frequency dark and white dots can be used to partially reconstruct the original colour from the black and white image. In one story, three episodes are re-colourised using this technique, and the fourth is colourised almost by hand (one frame in four is done manually, the other by a computer extrapolating).
- For some stories where there is both a black and white film and a colour NTSC conversion available (but no original PAL) they were able to combine luminance information from the film with chroma information from the back-converted video. (Not an easy task, given that film can shrink or stretch unevenly over time, while a video image doesn't).
- There's a lot of general clean-up of scratches, drop-outs, etc.
- For some stories there are optional CGI effects that can replace or enhance some of the original effects shots.
- In cases where an episode is entirely missing except for an audio track, the BBC commissioned brand new animated versions to replace them.
And that's just the technical side. On top of that, there are all of the financial and legal costs:
Actors who appear in a show need to be paid additional royalties if the episode is released on DVD or a streaming service.
Any music needs to have additional fees paid to the copyright holder. (On the DVD release of "Hamish Macbeth" there's an episode missing. The reason is that the plot revolves around an amateur production of "West Side Story" and the cast sing a couple of songs from the show. The cost of licensing those songs on a DVD was so vast that the BBC had no choice but to simply omit it from the DVD entirely.)
And there are a whole host of other creative and legal expenses involved.
And yet people genuinely believe that this entire process should be provided
free of charge to anyone who wants to view the show! It boggles the mind.