From All Movie Guide:The Beatles Anthology project (ultimately comprising audio, video, and book aspects) initially reached the public during the week of Thanksgiving 1995, with the first of three two-hour television specials broadcast Sunday, November 19, followed by the first of three two-CD sets of outtakes of the group's recordings released Tuesday, November 21. The TV portion continued on Wednesday and concluded on Thanksgiving. The second CD set was released in March 1996, with the third coming in October, while in September the VHS version of this video set was released.
(A coffee-table book was published in 2000.) It expanded enormously on the original TV broadcast, which ran six hours including commercials. The home-video version had eight episodes, each running between 71 and 81 minutes, for a total length just short of ten hours, which just about doubled the running time. (The 2003 DVD reissue contains five discs, with two episodes per disc, plus an 81-minute bonus disc containing extra material...