Quoting Draxen:

Quote:
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE4A572J20081106

I am from Finland and this is just stupid... 

That's really unbelievable 

That's just plain stupid! A buck is a buck, eh?...   

What I though was really funny here, is that Universal Pictures is counting their pennies for a couple of thousand Euros.... How cheap can you get in a conglomerate! 

Quoting Draxen:

Quote:
What I though was really funny here, is that Universal Pictures is counting their pennies for a couple of thousand Euros.... How cheap can you get in a conglomerate! 

It's actually quite a bit more than just a couple thousand dollars.

If you remember correctly, this was an hour show. The typical "hour show" averages about 47 minutes. you multiply that by $2.47 per minute and you get $116.00 (rounding down) per episode. The show ran for 9 years which gives you at least 200 episodes, so you take the $116 per episode and multiply that by 200 and you wind up with a cost for rating that series for release in that country of $23,200.

Considering the profit margin and the expected sales in that one country, I see why they wouldn't want to pay to have it rated. Especially when you consider the show is being aired there and people already know what it should be rated.

Strange, isn't it? 

Quoting Dan W:

Quote:
Quoting Draxen:

Quote:
What I though was really funny here, is that Universal Pictures is counting their pennies for a couple of thousand Euros.... How cheap can you get in a conglomerate! 

It's actually quite a bit more than just a couple thousand dollars.

If you remember correctly, this was an hour show. The typical "hour show" averages about 47 minutes. you multiply that by $2.47 per minute and you get $116.00 (rounding down) per episode. The show ran for 9 years which gives you at least 200 episodes, so you take the $116 per episode and multiply that by 200 and you wind up with a cost for rating that series for release in that country of $23,200.

Considering the profit margin and the expected sales in that one country, I see why they wouldn't want to pay to have it rated. Especially when you consider the show is being aired there and people already know what it should be rated.

Yes, I picked the "couple of thousand euros" just because so far only two seasons of this series is released on DVD around here, not all 9. At this rate they will have released all seasons by 2013 or something like that. $23,200 in 6 years is not that much for Universal Pictures, I would have thought... 

Anyway, I do understand that the DVD sales will not be diminished one bit due to this K18 rating, so I guess that's money-really-earned, even if it's peanuts for UP.

It may be that Universal is on principle not submitting to what is an unwarranted fee charged by a governmental agency.  Most of the purchasers of LHOTP in Finland (or anywhere else for that matter) would in all likelihood be adults, and probably parents of children for whom said parents want to get the program.

On Tuesday, Lions Gate released the Little House on the Prairie - The Complete Television Series in the US (R1) on 60 discs with a combined running time of 10,032 minutes.  At $2.47 per minute, Universal would have to pay around $25,000 to get a realistic rating.  Lions Gate executives realize that if they submit to Finland's fee, they set a precedent for doing the same thing in every country where they want to market LHOTP (or any TV series they own).  By letting the Adult rating stand, they have saved at least $25,000 (for the entire series), people in Finland know what the real rating SHOULD be since the program is so popular there, adults will buy the show for themselves and their kids, and if anything Lions Gate will sell more copies because of the "free" publicity articles like the Reuters one cited would generate.  It's a win-win situation for the distributors -- and a lose-lose situation for the tax assessors in Finland.

Quoting whispering:

Quote:
Not that uncommon. The down side is that e.g. none of my The 4400 DVD's (also non rated) show up on my online collection cause their rated 18

You can always check the two "Adult" boxes in your Online Collection settings, and then they will be visible online.