I love the Dewitt Jones tapes “Everyday Creativity” and “Celebrate What’s Right with the World”, but it’s difficult to rent them. They’re so popular, why don’t you have more copies?
and...
Our church would like
to have our own copy of Dewitt Jones’ tapes.
Where can we buy them?
Dewitt
Jones’ videos “Everyday Creativity” and “Celebrate What’s Right With
the World” are distributed through Star Thrower. They cost $695 each, however
we get a 50% discount bringing the price down to $347.50, which answers the
question “…why don’t you have more copies.”
You can buy the tapes for your church or district at the 50% discount price ($347.50) by calling Eilene Wisniewski, Star Thrower’s representative servicing non-profit purchasers. Eilene can be reached at 1-800-561-0291.
I
have recently moved from another conference and was surprised to learn that I
must pay a $10 rental fee on videos I rent from the conference office’s media
resource center.
Other conferences I’ve lived in have not had rental fees, the churches
paid a yearly fee.
I’m also curious why I pay the same $10 fee whether I have the video
mailed to me or I come by the office and pick the video up.
Shouldn’t I pay less if I pick it up in person?
We
want our media resource center to be self-sufficient so that it does not need
any apportionment funds.
By asking the users to pay rental fees for each video used, we believe we
are covering the costs of the center in the fairest possible manner.
That is why we don’t provide the videos for free and why we don’t
charge everyone a flat annual fee.
We
are such a large, spread-out conference, that we also decided it was unfair to
treat churches in the Denver area any different from churches outside this metro
area. The
fairest way to do that is to simply charge everyone the same fee.
Offering discounts for those who are fortunate enough to be able to stop
by is not equitable.
Regarding your article in the Spring 2001 Media Resource Services Quarterly "Copyrights & Video Licensing" – do we need a license to show videos put out by the church? For example the Mission Magazine videos.
According
to Bryan Cottingham, Electronic Media Development, United Methodist
Communications, “You
don't need any special license to show videos (produced by) the United Methodist
Church. They are designed to be viewed by groups.”
However,
this does not mean the churches don’t need to buy licenses. The
majority of videos which are rented from our conference media library and/or
commercial video rental stores are videos which were NOT produced by the United
Methodist Church and DO require a license to show to a group.
We’re
so excited! We just bought a DVD player for our church, but all you have in the
media library is VHS tapes. Why
I
have called EcuFilm, StarThrower and our other major distributors and
surprisingly, none of them seem to be in any hurry to go to DVD.
Most of the people I talked to acted like this was the first time the
subject had come up.
One concern I have is that most of the videos we have in our library are out of print now, so it’s unlikely that they will be converted to DVD. This is obviously an issue that will need more research, but in the meantime I guess we stick with VHS.
Rocky Mountain Conference of
the United Methodist Church
6110 Greenwood Plaza Blvd.
Greenwood Village, CO 80111
303-733-3736 ext 100
1-800-536-3736 ext 100
Netta@rmcumc.com