Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

Which years had these 25 minute league wide highlight reels produced? That would be a heck of a collectors set. I think individual teams yearbooks sets would also be a great seller. I think there would be a market for the old Inside the NFL seasons.

NFL Films started the color videos (I believe) in 1964, which had a lot of marching band music instead of the Sam Spence classics. Many early Game of the Weeks had fake crowd noise in the background in lieu of any music.

I always thought that complete season DVD sets of Game of the Week and This Week in Pro Football programs would be great.

JohnBowen wrote:Which years had these 25 minute league wide highlight reels produced? That would be a heck of a collectors set. I think individual teams yearbooks sets would also be a great seller. I think there would be a market for the old Inside the NFL seasons.

If you are looking for the "Year in Review" segments that NFL Films produced, they are included in the Super Bowl DVD box sets.

Some teams had yearly highlight films as far back as the 40s. I know the Packers had a silent film in 1942. Most teams had them from the 50s onward, but there are a couple of AFL franchises that didn't produce any in their first couple of seasons.

I think this is such a small niche market that the most likely avenue for getting these out to the public would be thru a subscription service a la Netflix, where you would pay, say, two dollars a month and be able to access everything in the NFL Films vaults including all available NFL TV broadcasts.

How about the iTunes model? Could I just buy a game or an old show and keep it? Say I wanted to buy Dolphins/Jets week 1 1982 for....I don't know - 2.99 maybe then I would always have that file in my collection to refer to whenever - that would be pretty cool.

On another note, I mentioned before there is a company that sells old Tel Ra films on DVD already - about 30 bucks a pop. I gently mentioned something to the owner about rights once and he feels fine about it.

TanksAndSpartans wrote:How about the iTunes model? Could I just buy a game or an old show and keep it? Say I wanted to buy Dolphins/Jets week 1 1982 for....I don't know - 2.99 maybe then I would always have that file in my collection to refer to whenever - that would be pretty cool.

On another note, I mentioned before there is a company that sells old Tel Ra films on DVD already - about 30 bucks a pop. I gently mentioned something to the owner about rights once and he feels fine about it.

Even with iTunes, you still don't technically own it, you can only own it on five devices. As somebody who has had an iTunes account for over ten years, and buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, whenever you move your iTunes account to an iPod, or transfer it to a new computer, and once you hit that wall of five devices, you no longer own the song and have to purchase it from iTunes all over again. I stopped using Itunes as my basic source for listening to music; I now use youtube where I can find everything for free.

I would like to see the NFL go to some sort of streaming source to allow users to view old games or old highlights, but I fear they will follow the iTunes model where you do not really own the game and cannot make a physical copy of the game.

I have been watching a lot of the old NFL Yearbooke from 72, 78 via you tube. I cannot manage to find 78 Chiefs. I want to look at that year in which they ran the wing-t offense.

I shouldn't have said iTunes then - I wasn't really thinking about that item being tied to a device. There's no technical roadblock to allowing the ownership of the file - I suppose they are only doing it so that you can't share it. I suspect Amazon Kindle is the same although I thought I read there is a way to convert your books to a pdf - maybe they block that now - I never tried.

Given the size of this market, I don't think sharing would be a big issue - I think the issue is they just don't feel there is enough demand to make a profit. (Also, I'd feel pretty stupid/unethical asking someone for a file I could buy for a few dollars). They may be right about the lack of profit, but maybe not - there isn't a shortage of videos on youtube - someone is interested in watching this old footage