Hi Mike....
I can't address the HD deliverability question for spots, because we have not had to deal with that yet (although I know it is coming any day now, so I will look forward to other answers you get)....
However, I can tell you what we do as far as charging for standard-def dubs...
About 95% of our work is broadcast commercials, with delivery on BetacamSP. Typically, we will make a commercial spot and the order will include a few dubs, something in the neighborhood of 5-15 dubs. We charge a flat rate of $25 a pop for these. We do not charge suite time for making them, because the actual dubbing time for a :30 is pretty inconsequential.
Here is another bit of legalize that we do: Clients' invoices list this charge as Dubbing
Service, not as actual
dubs, and all of our tape labels include a tiny fine-print line that says "This videotape remains the property of Fantastic Plastic and must be returned upon request." Of course we never ask for them back... yet about once a year we do receive a big box of tapes from an out-of-state television station full of our old spots. We finally called them and told them that they can just recycle them or dispose of them.
We do this for the obvious reason: so we don't have to charge sales tax on the dub. We are not selling them the tape, we are selling the service of production. One of my colleagues in my city who
does charge sales tax on dubs warned us that we would be bit for doing it this way, that it would not be deemed legal, and that we would end up having to charge sales tax... and perhaps pay back taxes on uncollected sales tax from years past. However, we did go through city, county, and state audits a couple of years ago... and in each case the auditor agreed with our system, that we were not required to charge sales tax unless we were actually
selling the tape, and they agreeded that we were not (they did, however, stick us for a fair little bit of back taxes on a few zillion bucks worth of equipment bought from out of state vendors through the years.... damn you B&H Photo!).
Keep in mind that the tax laws in your city/county/state may vary... we did it this way under the advice of our CPA.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
