There are lots of ways to deliver them free or for a price/subscription. The question for ITV is simply is it worth the time it will take personnel to make 8000+ episodes available? Probably not is the honest truth.

How many people would purchase all 8000 episodes if they were just £1 each? Very few have £8,000 to spend on back episodes of a soap opera. Would you?

That leaves them the option of providing them for free and using advertising to make it financially worthwhile. Again they will reach the same conclusion, the majority of people will seek out highlight episodes - births, deaths, marriage and exits which means that the bulk of episodes will generate no revenue, so again why provide them all?

Batches of highlight episodes are likely to remain the only way for ITV to monetise the archive. Being a highly commercial venture you can be sure ITV have looked at ways to monetise the series.

I too doubt they were making any money, however they were still breaching copyright and that is not public service.

I don't know who would want to sit through 8000 episodes. People complain enough about the show being boring at times, well imagine sitting through most of it which will be filler? If they are going to run with this idea they should only release relevant episodes from certain storylines, or something that stands out. I doubt anybody would want to binge the long drawn out boring plot that was Carla and Tracy.

My point exactly. Filler episodes and plots from the 1960s? Realistically how many people are going to watch them through from start to finish year by year?

Many people had no problem watching full years from the 70s to 90s on Auntie Corrie's channel. The trend seemed to be to pick a year and start from the beginning. Just watching highlight episodes doesn't work because you don't see the buildup and aftermath, and besides they're already on DVD. It's the people who already have the DVDs that want to see more.

Also remember that there were only 2 episodes a week until 1989.

I think you are missing my point about commerciality. Many people is how many? Of the numbers that viewed on Youtube how many viewed the whole way through? I know you don't know the answer to that but Youtube viewing figures are not really as insightful as one would imagine.

You say it's the people who have the DVDs want to see more and you are right, to a point. Some of the people who have the DVDs - for many the DVDs are plenty.

Back in the day there were only 2 episodes a week but we are talking over 8,000 episodes. To produce those on DVD would be very expensive with a replication house before packaging and getting BBFC certification.

The digital route is more likely and would be cheaper, but again it would require a sizeable investment. If they choose to host the video it would mean a system build and if they were to go the YouTube route they would incur large expense - YT charges commercial entities.

The fact of the matter is that the audience for the entire collection is small enough for it to be prohibitively expensive to produce. If it was commercially viable ITV would be all over it!

1989's the era I'd love to see again, with all the big storylines like the new houses being built, Ken's affair with Wendy Crozier and the culmination of all the Rita/Alan business

Had grand plans to watch them all and then the plug was pulled on Auntie Corrie. Not fair!

I think that's the point, really. We're used to seeing carefully selected packages of highlights from bygone days, but I bet a lot of the run-of-the-mill black and white episodes are as dull as ditchwater when viewed today (and possibly were then, too).

Aye, know how you feel! I started watching episodes from the year before, then one morning it was all gone. Good thing I managed to catch the week leading up to that Blackpool episode in 1989.

Resigned to the fact that ITV3 won't air episodes daily like Granada Plus did. I think streaming is the way forward, ITV will use a Netflix type service.

Auntie Corrie got significant viewing figures on YT. The viewing figures for old episodes range from 5000 to 50,000. Well marketed each of those numbers could have a 0 in front.

Conversely the convenience and the fact is was free will remove plenty of 0's from those figures.

But you would need much more specific data to make that assumption. Can you source those numbers?

How many were unique views? What percentage watched all the way through? Where there were drop-offs, at what point did they stop viewing? How were users being referred? Were certain 'event' episodes markedly more popular? How long were the files available on Youtube?

Given the number of episodes in question the viewing per episode would be much smaller and hazarding a guess I suspect the "event" episodes would be head and shoulder above in terms of numbers which justifies the assumption that selected episodes are more marketable than the entirety.

Location would be another issue. ITV sell rights to the programme around the globe and contractually may have to block access from certain territories if other distributors have exclusive rights.

It's complicated and costly which makes it unlikely ITV would pursue it. Perhaps a third party provider might curate it for them - I gather Network Distribution approached Granada/ITV for the initial boxsets and ITV had little involvement. It is possible that Network or a similar company could provide episode online but in all likelihood this would be a selection rather than the entirety.

I'm sorry, but I think the likelihood of having access to every episode is extremely remote

A well marketed online site that has adverts in the ad-breaks could pull in 50,000 to 50,0000 hits per video. The larger viewing figures for the big episodes could subsidies the rest allowing full watch throughers.

Its a shame all those episodes got removed, I wasnt even alive when the first ones were shown and I hadnt seen the later ones since they were first on probably. I only caught a couple though as I didnt have much time on my hands and next thing I knew they had been removed.

I think the only way releasing the whole archive could work would be on a subscription service similar to netflix where you pay fixed price installments to view as many or as little as you wish.

Where do you get that number? half a million people viewing the 1986 Rovers Fire or the 1967 train crash. Do you really think that's likely? half a million people tuning in to see Hilda Ogden or Annie Walker in 2016? How long would it take to meet that number of views and how many would be unique viewers?

Also on any video on YouTube more than 2 minutes long the drop off rate is massive. How many people would be likely to watch episode after episode from start to finish?

Again I could imagine interest in "event" episode but the rest would only engender mediocre interest.

The creation of such a service would be high and the returns likely low. ITV have their player of course but the bandwidth to supply and stream all of Coronation Street is likley a major obstacle. I guarantee they have looked at this in detail in regards to selected episodes and indeed all episodes.

Whenever I contact ITV about this they fob me off with "no plans at the moment but we're looking at an ITV archive" or words to that effect. Hopefully one day I can win the bloody lottery and I'll do it for them.

I wouldn't expect that to change anytime soon

It's a shame because at this point they're withholding a large part of our national history from us. How hard would it be to convert and upload the files to a basic shell website?

I remember they did have an ITV archive about 5 years ago (or maybe more) on itvs site I remember they uploaded a whole load of content from their history of a whole range of genres of programs and they had a bit of a selection of corrie past episode dunno what happened to the archived shows on the website as they not their anymore.

I also thought it was strange how when itv3 launched they stopped showing classic episodes as itv3 is surely Granada plus in all but name anyway. My theory on the reason why they stopped showing classic episodes was because as the current corrie lost quality due to number of episodes etc people will always be comparing what they were seeing in the way of classic episodes to the current episodes on the main ITV and itvs best interest is always too protect the current run of new corrie episodes.

The population of the UK is about 65 million, give or take a few thousand. So the figures you quote are very low.

Coronation Street is fiction though. History is fact.

The box sets of CS 1960s has only sold around 31,000 sets as of 2014, and it's been out for donkeys years. You can't tell the duplication figures for the 70s and 80s box sets as they no longer release the figures.
As an aside, and nothing to do with CS; but another popular programme- Dr Who has had some of the DVD releases of the b/w stories only reaching duplication figures of 5 or 6,000.
The market for old tv (especially b/w) is quite niche even for a popular programme.

Come on... Corrie is not national history!

It's not about how hard, it's about cost versus profit. It's not the shell of a website it's the capability to stream video and do so in a secure way, it's the cost of digitising any episodes that are not yet digitised (I suspect they all are but I could be wrong) and uploading them to a website, creating the content to go on that website.

It's a massive undertaking and would take a lot of time. It's a professional job that would cost a lot of money. If it was cost effective it would be done by now.

I think you should enjoy your DVDs and move on from ever seeing the show in it's entirety. You might find that the reality of watching it all would be less enjoyable than enjoying highlights.

As one of the most successful and long running television shows it is. It also broadly reflects massive changes in society over a significant period of time in attitudes, objects, characters and societal interactions.


The only time consuming part of it would be converting the videos to a digital format. I guarantee you that has already been done. Regarding the website shell - all you need is page 1 episode 1 page 2 episode 2 and a sidebar with a year-by-year on it - some featured episodes on the homepage and bobs your uncle. The data hosting cost I concede, but still believe enough revenue would be recuperated to pay that back. Not to mention the majority of the work is a one-off.

[QUOTE}I think you should enjoy your DVDs and move on from ever seeing the show in it's entirety. You might find that the reality of watching it all would be less enjoyable than enjoying highlights.[/quote]

I know that not to be true having watched April 1976- January 1980 in their entirety over the course of a year before they got nuked from YT. Seeing the build up to each other the significant events and the stories bubbling away for long periods of time was far more exciting, invigorating and watchable than just seeing the big events. Watching Ernie go from photographer self-employed facing difficulty to working at Mikes to get shot and watching the neighbours rally round to help Emily, before seeing her once again embark on her own life was far better than simply watching the robbery episode. Similarly for many other late 70s stories, I know it's a tall ask but seeing that from the first episode in 1960 to at the very least 2011 would be so great.