TVL_Stephen
Manager, Video Programming & Operations
TV Land Digital (tvland.com)

I agree, how sad........but if it makes you fell any better , i live in denver and and all ive seen so far is a shaving commercial over and over and over.........and over........still alot bugs in site!      good shaver as i own one but really would like to watch full shows .......not commercials

Hi joecamel,

If you could post some more information about the problem you are having (what series and specific episodes, what browser are you using, what version of FLASH), in a new Thread, I would be more than glad to help you get the full episodes running on your computer.

Thanks!

TVL_Stephen
Manager, Video Programming & Operations
TV Land Digital (tvland.com)

I wonder if targeted advertising (country-specific) would loosen up the rights issue. Advertisers could choose to either have one ad for everybody (if they sell worldwide) or different ads for different countries. If advertising slots for other countries are not filled up this way, then local advertisers in various countries and regions might be interested if the price were reasonable.

Then access from outside the US could just require registering and filling out a profile with the country/region information. This way it would also be easy to keep track of how many viewers from which areas, which would provide valuable marketing information for localized ads. The profile could also include interests, and would be helpful for US advertisers also if US viewers fill them out. For instance, I'm not interested in cars but am interested in computers. Car commercials are wasted on me. Might be interesting to move toward ad choices depending on such a profile rather than just hit or miss, especially since people are more likely to hang around when the shorter commercials online are on than during the interminably long commercial blocks on tv. It also shouldn't be too hard to come up with a related solution to Americans living outside the US so they could view even with the current system. There must be some easy way to "prove" American citizenship these days. A lot of Americans are only temporarily outside the US or come back for frequent visits/buy stuff for stateside friends and relatives, so they really are part of the US advertisers' target audience.

When YouTube ran into "rights" problems for full episodes, offering ad time convinced most of the rights owners that it would be better to keep their stuff on YouTube. TV Land could go a step further with the targeted advertising idea.

Geographical restrictions don't make so much sense on the net, especially since there are ways to fool the gatekeeper anyway. For instance,  years ago when Microsoft tried to keep mac people out of a Disney game site, claiming it would only work on Windoze machines - a mac'er just did a little jiggling to convince the gatekeeper program (that was denying access to anybody on a mac) that he was on a Windoze machine (and of course found out that Microsoft was lying....). I'm sure the restrictions make sense to your lawyers because they see the different TV Lands (e.g., Canada vs. the United States) as separate entities. But the average world citizen doesn't see it that way.  Cooperation must be possible between the different TV Lands, especially if money is to be made! 

Basically, it's in the site owners' best interest to make things as accessible as possible. Better to have a captive audience for profitable ads (both within the episodes and on the site in general) than to end up with pirated episodes spread around anyway...  bringing you zero profit.