In 2003 I was ever-so-slowly inheriting the collection of VHS of a show my whole family liked from my parents, who were buying the DVDs a season as a time when the prices dropped from heart-stopping to reasonable. So yeah, it was definitely available. Wikipedia, bastion of weird information, says that Firefly: the Complete Series was available in December 2003 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_%28TV_series%29#Home_video_releases ).