If you were a fan of classic British TV and film on DVD, the name Network DVD will almost certainly bring back fond memories.
For over two decades, it was the go-to destination for lovingly restored releases of shows that everyone else had forgotten about. So when the website recently reappeared online, some fans got a little excited.
They shouldn’t have. What’s back isn’t Network DVD. It’s something much more cynical.
What Was Network DVD?
For those who never came across it, Network Distributing – which traded online as Network DVD – was one of those companies that felt like it was run by people who genuinely cared. Because it was.
Founded in 1997 by Tim Beddows, the company started modestly – its very first releases were VHS tapes of Charley Says, those public information films that terrified an entire generation of British children.
From those humble beginnings, Network grew into something remarkable: the UK’s definitive publisher of rare, classic British television and film on DVD and Blu-ray.
In the early 2000s, Network struck a landmark licensing deal with ITV that opened the floodgates to a vast archive of British television that had been gathering dust for decades. Suddenly, you could own pristine releases of The Saint, The Sweeney, The Prisoner, and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) – but that was just the headline stuff.
Network’s real passion was for the obscure. Shows that had aired for a single series back in 1973 and never been seen since. Forgotten British B-movies. ITC adventure series that mainstream distributors wouldn’t touch.
If there was potentially an audience for something – even a very small one – Network would find a way to release it.
Their Blu-ray work, in particular, was impressive. Proper restorations from original negatives, correct aspect ratios, full bonus features, and packaging that showed obvious love for the material. They even won a FOCAL award for their restoration of Joe 90 in 2019.
Fans of the Gerry Anderson back catalogue – Space: 1999, UFO, Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and more – had particular reason to be grateful. Network released almost every surviving Anderson series in quality editions that fans had waited years for.
The website itself started life at networkdvd.net, and became a beloved destination in its own right. Regular sales, exclusive releases, and a catalogue so deep that you could spend hours discovering things you never knew you’d been missing.
In later years, as the company expanded into streaming, they rebranded and moved to a new home at NetworkOnAir.com – the name chosen deliberately, as Tim Beddows explained in an interview, because they were planning to go “on air” with a video-on-demand platform.
That streaming service eventually launched in 2020, letting fans rent curated evenings of classic programming.
A Sudden and Sad End
In November 2022, Tim Beddows died suddenly at just 59 years old. Six months later, in May 2023, Network Distributing went into liquidation.
The closure was shockingly abrupt. One day the website was simply gone – no warning email to the mailing list, no notice to customers who had pre-orders in progress.
People went to place an order and found nothing there. Those who had pre-ordered items – including a then-upcoming Blu-ray of The Baron that had seemed just around the corner – lost both their money and their anticipated releases.
Tim’s partner Juan Veloza later released a statement acknowledging that, despite their best efforts, the company faced challenges that made continuing impossible.
The overwhelming sense from those who knew the company was that Network was, in many ways, inseparable from its founder. Without Tim Beddows, it simply couldn’t go on.
The reaction from the British TV and film community was one of genuine grief. Forum posts, tribute articles, and social media threads poured in from fans who had spent years – sometimes decades – buying from Network.
The Gerry Anderson official account called it “the end of a golden era.” Because for many, that’s exactly what it was.
The Nostalgia Market Is Booming
These days, the appetite for classic and nostalgic British TV has never been stronger.
Talking Pictures TV – the beloved family-run channel from a shed in Hertfordshire that broadcasts vintage British films and forgotten classics – pulls in around 4 million viewers a month, and recently expanded onto the Freely streaming platform.
Rewind TV launched on Sky in 2024, arrived on Freeview that September, and has been quietly building an audience with everything from Jilly Cooper adaptations to late-night cult cinema.
Both channels are thriving precisely because there’s a massive, passionate, and underserved audience for this kind of content.
That same audience – the people who grew up watching The Sweeney, The Professionals, Space: 1999, or any number of shows that mainstream streaming simply doesn’t carry – was the exact audience Network DVD served for 25 years.
The Website Is Back – But Something Is Very Wrong
Recently, a website has reappeared at networkdvd.net – Network’s original, genuine domain from their early years (we’re not going to link to it directly, for reasons you’re about to understand).
At first glance it looks exactly like the old Network DVD site, because it essentially is. The layout is recognisable. The categories are there – Drama, Comedy, Cult Kids, Blu-ray, Films. There’s a shopping basket. Old product listings appear, including classic Network titles.
But look a little closer and things quickly fall apart. Images are broken throughout. Most links lead nowhere useful. The shopping basket shows £0.00 and you can’t actually buy anything – clicking through to a product does nothing productive.
There are no real prices, no checkout, no way to place an order.
And scrolling down the homepage, you’ll find something that has absolutely nothing to do with classic British television: a long list of links to gambling websites.
Casino sites, slots, Crypto platforms. Sites targeting French, Italian, Japanese and Ukrainian gamblers. Dozens of them, sitting right there on what appears to be a beloved DVD retailer’s homepage, brazenly labelled “Quality picks.”
So what on earth is going on?
The SEO Trick Explained
To understand this, you need to know a little about how Google decides which websites to show you when you search for something.
Google doesn’t just look at what a website says about itself. It also pays close attention to how many other websites link to it, and how trusted those linking websites are.
If lots of well-regarded, established websites point to yours, Google takes that as a signal that your site is credible – and ranks it higher in search results. These incoming links are called backlinks, and building them up legitimately takes years of work.
Over its years of active trading, the networkdvd.net domain accumulated an enormous amount of this kind of trust. Thousands of DVD fan sites, review blogs, Gerry Anderson forums, TV history websites, and specialist retailers all linked to it.
That’s years of credibility, built up link by link – and crucially, many of those links were still there even after Network moved to NetworkOnAir.com and left the old domain sitting dormant.
When Network DVD closed and networkdvd.net was left abandoned, someone eventually spotted an opportunity.
They registered the domain and used archived copies of the old website – sourced from tools like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which photographs websites over time and keeps snapshots going back decades – to rebuild a convincing-looking version of the old shop.
They kept the same look, structure and URLs, because the links pointing to the old site from all those fan pages and review blogs were tied to those specific addresses, and still carrying all that hard-earned credibility.
Then they added their own links to gambling sites throughout the page. The idea is that Google sees an apparently well-established, trustworthy website about classic British DVDs – with loads of other genuine sites linking to it – pointing to these casino and crypto platforms.
That borrowed credibility helps push those sites up Google’s rankings.
It’s a scheme that’s well-known in the world of online marketing – snapping up abandoned domains with strong reputations and using them as a kind of credibility laundering machine.
It violates Google’s own rules, but it’s widespread, and beloved niche sites with passionate fan communities behind them are a particularly attractive target.
Don’t Buy Anything, Don’t Share the Link
To be absolutely clear: there is nothing to buy on this site. Network DVD as a company no longer exists. No purchases will be processed, no DVDs will arrive (unless you happen to have a time machine), and any payment details entered would be at serious risk.
If you’re looking for Network DVD titles, your best bets are secondhand marketplaces like eBay, where Network’s releases still surface regularly – though prices have risen since the closure.
Some titles have been picked up by other distributors, and Spirit Entertainment acquired a portion of the remaining stock after the liquidation.
That said, there is one small, unintended silver lining to all of this. Stumbling across that old site – even in its broken, zombie form – is a genuine nostalgia hit for anyone who spent time browsing the real thing.
The categories are all there. The old product names. The familiar layout. For a moment, it almost feels like popping into a shop you loved, only to find it boarded up with a photo of what it used to look like taped to the window. Bittersweet doesn’t quite cover it.
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I had a genuine moment of hope for a second. However, I have found a genuine Blu-Ray / DVD rental service, albeit not quite as many classics as Network carried. I’m sure most folks already know about it but it’s called Cinema Paradiso. Whilst you can’t buy from them you can rent and, for me, it’s become a great replacement for Netflix.