As usual, my first stop is always Amazon. They seem to have pretty solid, just-under-retail pricing scheme. They’ve been my number one online source for online purchases for the last five years. In this case, the price seemed incredibly high: $211!! That’s just over $40 dollars per season, which was more than what I would expect any  individual season to cost. I’m not buying diamonds, people.

To verify this I added all of the individual seasons together, again priced at Amazon.   The result? $202.  This was disheartening. You could basically get a 5% discount by buying each item individually, but it’s not impressive enough to be anything more than  a blip. Something is wrong at Amazon, and I don’t like it. While I love Babylon 5, there’s got to be a better way.

At this point I checked eBay and put in a few bids. Most sets seemed to be going for anywhere between $90 and $140. This is 50% cheaper than the Amazon prices, but you’ve got to take your chances with the unknown sellers of the massive, online-sales supergiant.  I was further restricted from this option by my terrible bidding skills;  I kept losing every bid.

Returning to the world I love of higher prices with no bidding skill required, I decided to check Buy.com to see what they had in store for me.  I’ve been using this site on and off when Amazon’s prices border on the insane. The full series of Babylon 5 is available for $153 with shipping!!! How can this be? This price is 25% lower than the Amazon options.  At $30 per season we’re almost in business. It’s still quite the investment, but we’re talking about one of the best sci-fi shows of all time.

The last test was to see if the blip in Amazon’s pricing also applied to here.  Individual pricing of the seasons was $20 per season resulting in a flat $100 for all 5 seasons of B5. This cost is less than 50% of the Amazon prices, and 30% less than Buy.com complete set. The best news is how comparable the Buy.com price is to eBay listings without any of the hassle or dangers of bidding sales. If you haven’t noticed, I hate bidding on things. It makes me feel so…..dirty.

BONUS:

The Amazon Video Store is asking $2 per episode with discounts bringing the 20-something-episode seasons down to between $36 and $38. This puts their Video on Demand price for the full series at about $185. I’m a big fan of streaming video (Hulu, Netflix, and the Roku), but this price seems outrageous to me.  The distribution costs of the electronic versions are drastically lower than physical discs. While there will be continuing maintenance/bandwidth costs for electronic distribution, it’s completely absurd to think that this market will be successful without drastically reduced prices. I think Amazon is basing their VoD pricing on iTunes’ Store and Amazon’s own cloud services. It doesn’t make any sense to the end consumer right now to be spending this much on intangible product. Even if they see profit margin reduction in these early days it seems like they couldn’t afford the long term cost of losing any potential consumer base to Netflix, Blockbuster, and other video services.