You may be right. Unfortunately, however, what may be "best for the public" is not the primary decision-making factor. First and foremost, it's a matter of money.
We dropped a huge amount of money into the filming of the bronze syllabus. This came out of our own pockets, and was a one-time investment. If there are to be any more web syllabus film shoots in the future, the profits derived from the premium membership program will need to be strong enough to make a future film shoot not only finincially feasible, but financially comfortable. "Financially feasible" means we generate enough revenue to recoup the cost of the original bronze production, in addition to covering the cost of the proposed production. "Financially comfortable" means enough income left over after covering these costs to pay us back for our own time and effort. Even at minimum wage, that's a significant sum.
More than likely, the web-based footage for the upper levels will come from material filmed for DVD. With DVD, profits are more immediate and typically pay for the cost of production within a month or two of initial release. The production therefore pays for itself, and the footage can double as web-based clips. This is a much smarter approach to acquiring web footage.
There is one catch, however: DVD's are much slower to produce. The current set of web clips are simple demonstrations, which allowed us to fly through the syllabus in just 3 days of filming. To produce a quality DVD, you need to add complete instruction for each figure, as well as fundamental principles of dancing. This slows things down to a snail's pace. Instead of 22 dances in 3 days, we'll probably require 1 day of filming per dance per level. That's 22 days of filming for bronze alone.
Since we are quite comfortable selling DanceVision's DVD's at 50% profit, it makes it that much more difficult to commit to the kind of time and effort commitment it will take to produce an entire syllabus of DVD's. Factor in all the other projects I want to pursue (including continuing my own dance education), and it's not looking good for the DVD prospect.
That's not to say we will never sell our own line of complete syllabus instruction from bronze through gold. It's just too difficult right now to predict how long it might take, or for that matter, what form it will take. By the time we're able to do it, it might be much smarter to forget DVD's and jusgt focus on web-based delivery methods. Who knows. Whatever the case, I think it's safe to say that silver level is still quite a ways off.
But I do agree that continuity Waltz & Foxtrot are so unique that we should probably try somehow to add video clips for them, even if we can't do it for any other silver dance. Since that can probably be done in just a couple of hours, we might be able to piggyback the project at the end of some other DVD-related film shoot. I'll keep it in mind.
Regards,
Jonathan