Video Previews
I was hired to work on the Babylon 5 web site in October of 1995. At that time the site was still on the rapidly becoming obsolete Pathfinder portal run by Time-Warner. Visitors to the site were often greeted with ridiculously long URLs that attempted to keep their session ID in the browser query string.
Once I got settled in and established as the resident Babylon 5 expert, they began to ask me what types of things (programming) I would like to see on the site from a fan's perspective. I looked at some of the other things we were doing, including our fancy new multimedia digitizing room and said "episodic promos."
Babylon 5 and EXTRA Online were the #1 online properties for Warner Bros. at this time. Even after the addition of Rosie O'Donnell, The top three remained the power-hitters for the division, and company, for years. So when I made a suggestion, more often than not I was met with a "do it."
The studio sent us the episodic promos on 3/4" tape every week. Either myself or my immediate supervisor, Sam Smith, would digitize the video at 160x120 mode and post both an AVI and a "Quicktime Theater" version. You can see from the list below where we actually started doing this. I believe it was around "The Fall of Night" and the ones previous to that were the rerun previews.
The response to the episodic previews was incredible, so we kept the feature going throughout the 3rd and 4th seasons of the show. When I left to work on the game show Pictionary in the fifth season, suddenly the previews stopped. I came back to the division in late 1999, but at that point Babylon 5 was considered a "legacy" property and I was not allowed much time to bring it back up to snuff. Somewhere between 2000-2001, the site was completely turned off and forwarded to the Warner Bros. Home Video site.
So, here are all of the episodic previews myself and Sam created at Warner Bros. For the sake of space, I am including only the AVI versions, and then the MOV versions, which we switched to in the fourth season.