What's he going to do though? Send the fanbase after Hasbro and piss off the people who contracted his company? I just don't buy that Shout Factory, a small DVD distribution company has dominance over Hasbro over Hasbro's property.
I can't buy that the company that has gone above and beyond with their releases of MST3K would just blow off the bronies of their own choice.
Hasbro
sold the home video rights to the highest bidder, for a limited time, usually just a couple of years, unless Shout pays to extend those rights. There are always some minor little details in the contracts, like that Shout isn't allowed to damage the brand, which means that they're not allowed to include things like Apple.mov or the Spiderses or some of Carek's Molestia porn as extras on the DVD, but that's to be expected.
It's VERY unlikely that Hasbro would sell a home video contract that was crippled and specifically disallowed a box set, not when Shout has made box sets of all sorts of Hasbro products. Hasbro sold Rhino the home video rights to G1 Transformers, GI Joe and Jem a while back, and Rhino released them as singles. After Rhino milked those for a while, they packaged them into box sets and sold them some more. Then Rhino's rights expired and reverted back to Hasbro, and Shout thought they still had sales left in them, so Shout bought them. Shout released box sets and even boxes of box sets, and made tons of money.
Hasbro is currently letting Apple sell episodes online a day after they're aired, and they just dropped full seasons on Netflix. Hasbro wants money because on paper The Hub is losing tons of money. They're not going to try and drive away potential buyers of their home video rights by crippling the home video release.
Especially not when Shout has explained why they're releasing the way they are, and why they're not releasing the way we want, and the explanations are reasonable (if misguided). $40 x 30,000 units needed to earn money is $1.2 million. $30 x 50,000 units is $1.5 million. Bronies are asking a small company like Shout to bet a million dollars on the theory that people who watched a show for free on Youtube are actually willing to pay for it.
Shout makes bets like that on a regular basis, but they're betting on shows that
millions of people have seen on TV, and they're putting stuff on retail shelves hoping just a few of those former viewers will buy it on nostalgia impulse. They don't expect customers to actively seek them out. Brian has mentioned that he constantly gets requests on his forums for obscure shows that a tiny group of fans desperately want, and they all claim that tons of people would buy it, but in his experience they'd sell ten copies. He thinks bronies are just another one of these groups.
People have said on his forums lately that he should just put us to the test on kickstarter, at which point all the risk would be gone. Bronies would have to put up or shut up. But Shout Factory doesn't seem to be interested.
But they did for MLP. Just because they handled one case well doesn't mean they handle everything in the same way, even assuming Hasbro/the Hub was the issue here, they haven't really done anything with MLP:FiM on their part.
I saw someone mentioning that the audio/video synch problem most likely occurred because DHX/Studio B sent them 1080p 5.1 surround masters, and Shout was responsible for crushing it down to 480p stereo.
Another reason we need a Blu-Ray release.
