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Fans Attempting to Pay for Enterprise
An anonymous reader writes "What started of as a suggestion to pay for season 5 of Enterprise has actully snowballed into a project that no one has ever attempted before, that of getting fans to pay for the production costs of a tv series. It has brought on board a raft of people including lawyers. I wonder if the quoted $50 to $80 million is reachable." I gotta say that Enterprise has been better this season, but I feel like it's still only mediocre. Battlestar Galactica might be the best SciFi airing right now. And I woulda chipped in for more Firefly in a heartbeat.
By taping in my basement and wearing our homemade costumes! Live long and prosper.
Yes, they really do run that many commercials in a "one hour" show.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
The main stumbling block, of course, is securing a suitable source of gold-pressed latinum.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Star Trek has been kept running on the popularity of the mythos, of the franchise. It has always been self-sustaining, through its own quality. If a Star Trek show is in such a bad state that it needs to rely on fan charity to survive... it isn't worth keeping.
The coolest voice ever.
I'm already paying to receive my tv feeds. If I pay for just a show I better receive all rights of ownership for that show. I also better get all dvd right as well as rebroadcast rights.
If this works out, then would the fans have more say over the direction of the show? Open source Star Trek?
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Didn't somebody try the same for Farscape?
There is no way both fans have that kind of money.
After 9/11 when Amazon starting taking donations they only made $6.8 million dollars, and that was a big thing where over 170,000 people donated. They expect Trekkies to pay more just for a show?
On the operational side, a good comparison might be that show with McGiever going into the portal to fight minorities on other planets (can't recall the name). It started as a movie, then it was on one of those extra-pay pr0n channels, then it got to sci-fi channel. And somewhere along the way it might have also been showing new episodes through syndication.
In the unlikely situation that the money is raised - an individual, or registered organisation that represents the fund would have to enter into a contract with Paramount. At this point they become an investor in the franchise and its development. What happens if Paramount fail to produce the show? Legal action? What also happens to the advertising and syndication revenue? Are people investing purely to finance a vehicle that will make the franchise owner money - or would they seek to recoup their investment? That's just the beginning. I can't see Paramount taking cash from the fans in this way.
I have an idea....Seriously..
If Paramount would provide a Bittorrent of the Show WITH the commercials on the site AND make sure the quality of the video is as good or better than what can be gotten off of bittorrent web sites, they might be able to get people to watch.
Here is how it would work. You make it freely available but make users go through a page that informs them that by getting the video from an offical Paramount site they (Paramount) can prove to their advertizers that people are watching the show with ads (arguably...how do you know if people are ACTUALLY watching them...but then they don't know if nielson watchers actually watch the ads either).
By publicly advertizing that if people want to support the show they can download it from the their torrent (or web link) would provide an incen tive for people to get it from them instead of off of some offshore web torrent site.
They could update the commercials evey now and then if they wanted.
The KEY though is that the video HAS to be better than what is being distributed right now! If what is on tvtorrent or tvswarm is XVID HDTV 5.1 surround then they need to match or exceed it.
Fans of the show could then DIRECTLY support the show. People who get the non-advertzing version off of some peer to peer network are people who don't give a rats ass about the show making it anyhow.....but give people a way to pay (without money) and they'll take it (My theory of course!)
You've got to be kidding. Everyone tells me what I should do with my money. The governement is the worst. They have guns and prisons for me if I don't spend my money in ways they accept.
Say what you want about the quality of Enterprise-- I'm more interested in the idea of fans buying their shows directly. Sign me up.
Screw ads, screw broadcast, screw the networks/middlemen/etc... let me buy my shows directly from the people who make them! Even just releasing everything to DVD immediately after it airs would be good enough for me-- if I wasn't paying for DirecTV, I'd have a nice monthly budget for buying just the shows I like on DVD or via download.
As it is, I'm paying for a lot of channels I never watch, PLUS watching ads, just to get the handful of shows I enjoy. The system could be a thousand times better if "broadcasters" and "channels" went the way of the dodo and left us buying our shows directly from the people who make them.
Yes, the farscapers tried something like this, they didn't get enough for an entire episode but they did get alot of money for donations to military librarys, and ads, and other stuff...
www.savefarscape.com
May we assume you are following your own advice? Whenever you are about to buy a luxury good you stop yourself and donate the money to the poor instead?
Seriously, do you accost people queueing at the office box and ask them to give their movie money to tsunami aid? If it is ok to pay $10 for a movie, why can't I donate $10 towards the next startrek without being attacked by do-gooders such as yourself?
Supposing they actually do raise the dough and pay for an entire season.
Who owns those episodes?
Who gets the money from DVD rights? Broadcast rights? Commercials?
More importantly -- who approves the scripts? If I was paying for an entire run of a TV series, I'd at least want to read the scripts. Get a bunch of Star Trek fans involved with a script approval process and you'll have a riot.
Paramount would be wise to just let it die a respectable death.
"Way to let "The Man" know how much of our soles he ownes!"
I didn't know "The Man" was after the bottom of our feet...I will be sure to keep my socks on at night.
Seriously though, what gives you the right to tell people how to spend their money. Gone to or rented a movie lately? Why don't you donate that money to cancer research? Going out to dinner? You should eat in and send the savings to cancer research. Posting on Slashdot? Why waste time when you could be earning more money for cancer research. Do you see what I am saying? Just because you think that how these people spend their money is stupid, you ought to look at your own life and look at all the crap you buy that you could donate to charity.
While I defend people's right to waste money as they choose, I do think this is pretty crazy. I watched the show a few times and it was just plain bad. The Captain is just a female version of Kirk. I say that because she just isn't a very good actress. The one think Kirk did have was charisma. A bad actress with no charisma as the main character? eh, I'll pass. I love sci fi as much as the next dork, but I would be surprised if this show would garner that much support.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Money doesn't work like that.
You remind me of the guy who said the Penny Arcade Christmas fund money should have gone to a more deserving cause. It's just a totally bizarre statement. Go out and raise money for whatever good cause you want; it's got absolutely nothing to do with this. (Money doesn't disappear when it's spent).
In other words, in order to get them to go for this, you'd have to cover the lost advertisement revenue AS WELL AS the production costs. That's probably going to be over $150 million at least.
So it's selfish when I pay $2400 for a Powerbook G4? Or when I spend $900 on a nice flat panel monitor?
If I can't spend any of my money on myself, and on things that I like, WHAT'S THE POINT?
Every good person has their own way of giving back to society and the planet. I volunteer at an animal sanctuary; others donate lots of money to charity, and so on.
But I still feel we should have the right to spend money on ourselves without being called "selfish". Sheesh.
-Z
I think your comment neatly summarizes the Star Trek ethos pretty well.
Or not.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Beer is not a luxury.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
The type of people who watch Enterprise happen to be the most likely to embrace BitTorrent and similar technologies.
As a result, supposed two shows air at the same time. Given the choice of downloading one and watching/recording the other, I chose to download Enterprise. Why?
1) Enterprise is popular. It typically has the largest BT swarms, and often the best S/L ratio (another testament to the types of users who watch Enterprise - geek types are more likely to leave the torrent running after completion.)
2) Given a choice between recording CBS and recording UPN, I choose recording CBS. UPN needs to petition the FCC for a transmitter power increase in the NYC area. Sad when your flagship station's transmitter is a piece of shit and your signal crashes people's MPEG encoders.
3) Higher quality from the Torrent. A combination of signal issues and the fact that UPN's HD signal in the NYC area is shit.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If I was paying for an entire run of a TV series, I'd at least want to read the scripts. Get a bunch of Star Trek fans involved with a script approval process and you'll have a riot.
No, *I* get the cameo walk on role...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
It seems you are forgetting that fiction has an important role in society. It looks like you think that anything fictitious is not worth any effort whatsoever.
But in fact, science fiction and other forms of speculation DO have an important role to play. If you watch PBS a lot (as do I) you know that they will frequently run documentaries on subjects such as the Apollo lunar program. While the documentaries will focus on the 'how it was done' aspect and interview scientists and researchers and other individuals who worked on those projects, they will also sometimes mention the inspiration for them. And it's important to pay attention to those things.
Take the case of Jules Verne, for instance. Verne was a prodigious science fiction writer who imagined Project Apollo to an amazing degree of accuracy -- his ship looked roughly like Apollo's command and service modules, was roughly the same size, carried a three-person crew, was named Columbia, and was launched from the coast of Florida. This is almost exactly how the Apollo program operated by the time the first actual manned lunar mission was launched in 1968 (Apollo 8; no landing actually occurred until 1969.)
Now, while it is true that many people did not believe such a thing was possible (Robert Goddard was laughed at for believing that a rocket would function in a vacuum, for instance) and Verne's stories were dismissed as fantasy (nuclear-powered submarines!? Are you crazy!?) they came true, in time.
Going back to Project Apollo, you may or may not remember that the first few crews to visit the Moon were quarantined upon their return to make sure that there were no dangerous organisms on them or their clothing or in their spacecraft. The fear of a possible contamination of Earth was raised, in part, by Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain, as well as by points raised by the scientific community. As a result, quarantines continued until we had enough experience with returning Apollo crews to believe that they were no longer necessary. (Apollo 12's recovery of Surveyor hardware, and the subsequent discovery of terrestrial bacteria surviving on some of that equipment, proved that organisms could survive for long periods of time in space.)
We have also been influenced by other major works of science fiction (War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, for instance, has long been held as an example of how we might react to the idea of hostile alien life, and ET is an example of how we could react to more friendly aliens.)
For something to happen, it has to be imagined first. Sometimes, that takes the form of science fiction stories. Not worth it? Far from it. We'll be forever stuck in the present and never stop to imagine what might come in the future without the ideas that come from those who dare to say "Hey, what if this was possible?"
i am a soviet space shuttle
the only tv shows that ever have or ever will make me surrender money are on PBS.
I won't give money to PBS.
The local station only shows the shows I want to watch when they're doing a beg-a-thon. And they interrupt those shows every 15 minutes to beg some more.
If they showed them outside of the beg-a-thon, I might consider it, but they don't. So screw 'em.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I can't tell if you're confusing Enterprise with Voyager, or if you're making a subtle comment about Archer. :)
It's OK! I'm a limo driver!
I was immensely against this series before it aired, and most especially because of the changes to Starbuck, which I felt like was akin to rewriting the bible and making Jesus a woman.
I will however be the first to admit I was completely wrong about BS:G.
So far it has been nothing short of brilliant. What has especially impressed me is the overall tone of it. I think it was Ron Moore who said (paraphrasing) that the original series wasn't true to it's own premise... in the original, within a week or so of Caprica being devastated, they were in bars on other planets with other humans, having a blast, generally not acting like the future of the human species hung in the balance. I never thought of it before, but damn it if he wasn't right! I still love the original series, but I do view it in a different light now. The remake has really gotten this right, in the extreme. There is a truly palpabale sense of dread throughout it, and that is fantastic as far as I'm concerned.
But...
This is NOT the best sci-fi show on the air today. It's third, near as I can tell, behind Stargate SG1 and SG:Atlantis. SG1 has been the best for some years now, ever since Babylon 5 went off the air actually. Atlantis has come on unbelievably strong this first season, and I predict here and now we're going to be hailing it's greatness 10 years down the road when it's still chugging along. And it wouldn't surprise me it SG1 was still producing new episodes then too!
And if B5 is still airing in your market, than IT is the best show on TV today.
None of this takes away from how good BS:G has been though. It has completely proved me wrong. Hell, I'm even getting used to the new Starbuck, I think the actress playing her is doing an excellent job in the role. If they can keep this up, it's going to be a fantastic and long ride!
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Attach a dynamo to Gene Roddenberry's corpse and play the first few seasons of Enterprise at his gravesite. Sell the electricity generated from his spinning corpse to the power companies and it should be more than enough to finance several more seasons of the show.
Lets stop pussy footing around. There are no ownership or copyright issues.
You start with a plot outline, create a shooting schedule, line up some actors, start filming, put the thing out there.
The quality of the visuals will NOT be up to Star Trek vehicles to date but the writing could be much better, the acting could be better.
Even the set could be a digital one to allow 'transportation' at no cost (think of the techniques used for the "Polar Express".)
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