Credits intentionally clipped in iTunes TV Episodes?

An episode of Surface was sans credits. It was removed (for about a
week) and then replaced with a version with credits.I noticed
right around the time you wrote about the Office episode without
credits the first time.

Tom,
Finishing up school at the moment (graduating May 06), but I worked on NBC's Hawaii (the cop show that got cancelled mid-season), as well as a couple other smaller shows as Production Assistant. At school I'm the Video Production Coordinator for our production operations. You can check out my site: http://www.davidmhepburn.com

Bigfat, you could be right. I know that the Director's Guild of America's (my union) recent contract touches on digital distribution for residuals formulation. I am sure that this particular way of distribution was unknown at the time of the contract negotiations (2004.) Of course, by the time the shows are available for iTunes, the Guilds: Screen Actors, Director's, Writer's; and the unions already know who worked on them. It's not like Apple is trying to hide the shows. The point I was making is that the closing credits are important and they are not simply a re-hash of the opening credits. I know they are small, but believe me... My 55 year old Mom has no problem seeing my name when it flashes by!

David: what show do you work on? What do you do? In LA or where? Me, freelance AD in North Carolina.

No, that'd be a downstreaming thing. They have the raw un-squished credits on the masters.

Could it be because the end credits are squeezed to show "Coming Up..." sorts of things, that they are not made available to the network in the full frame form, only to the syndicators and DVD mastering houses?

Bigfat (#9),
Good thought. Could be that the contracts were not ready for this sort of media distribution when they were made. Still...seems kind of harsh for the networks to just cut them out. I work on television shows as well and I agree, credits are very important for us Below-the-Liner's.

I've sent a few support questions to the iTMS over the past year or two and have come to the conclusion that it's some sort of charity job for the borderline mentally retarded.

Even when presented with evidence that the track list is incorrect or a track has the wrong title, they keep blindly giving boilerplate responses.

"No, I don't want to download it again...it's WRONG and I want you to fix it!"

"Closing credits are VERY important to certain "Below the Line" crew members whose contracts provide for residual payments based on re-runs, video sales and rentals, syndication, etc."

Funny you bring that up, in what with Gene said. Maybe this contract doesn't cover internet distributions? Because if you think about it, online streams or versions of video or clips from TV shows(like, say, Daily Show clips from Comedycentral.com) don't show credits.

Gene,
That's a decent possibility, but wouldn't there be some sort of legal implications with the networks? And...adding to the mystery, as stated above, it seems to be a network choice, not an Apple choice. Maybe it's to shave time off the shows and thus keep filesize as small as possible.

Perhaps they dump them because they're so small that they're beyond the realm of the readable on an iPod screen.