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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.
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.
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.
By taping in my basement and wearing our homemade costumes! Live long and prosper.
You mean your Mom's Basement.
My user number is prime. Is yours?
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
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
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?
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
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.