The rights to many shows are tangled into "byzantine" webs. This is often a good thing, for reasons of economic incentives. To use a personal example: let's lo

The rights to many shows are tangled into "byzantine" webs. This is often a good thing, for reasons of economic incentives. To use a personal example: let's look at the various parties involved in making "The Simpsons," whose DVDs have been available for many years. I had the good fortune to work on this show, albeit in a limited capacity, many moons ago. On this show, you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen (and I may be mangling some names here and there): - Gracie Films (production company) - Fox Television Studios (studio) - Fox Broadcasting Company (network) - Akom (animation company, based in Korea) - 20th Century Fox Licensing & Merchandising division - Whoever holds the rights for the music and theme song - Matt Groening - Syndicators in US and around the world - Actors, writers, crew, and their various agents, managers, and lawyers - Affiliates and home video partners - Effects shops (if any, and if different from services performed by Akom) Why would you want all of these moving parts? Isn't coordinating all of these stakeholders like herding cats? Well, yes. But absent this ecosystem of specialized players, no single player would be able to do everything at scale. The distributed ecosystem of TV development, production, distribution, and licensing is more efficient -- and allows for more shows to be made in the first place! -- than a system where a single company performs every step of the process. Of course, this distributed system has its downsides. Complexity being a big one. No single party can unilaterally make decisions on behalf of the entire show. When the right aggregation of the aforementioned parties cannot come to an agreement about X, Y, or Z, then X, Y, or Z simply don't get done. This seems to have been the case with the Batman series. It's the case for several beloved shows, whose absence from the home video market is noticeable. It sucks when it happens. This system is far from perfect. It is riddled with inefficiencies. Occasionally it leads to some mind-numbingly frustrating stalemates. It's especially bad about managing music rights; many high-profile shows have come to DVD and Blu-ray only very recently, after many years of wrangling the rights to the music in the shows. (Particularly '80s shows, which often relied on lots and lots of the pop music of the day). But in many ways, and on the balance, today's system is an improvement over the systems that came before it. Generally speaking, this system is great at getting shows made. It is less than great at getting shows distributed to streaming services and home video. The system's strengths at the former are its weaknesses at the latter. It's an interesting paradox.