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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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
"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
Out of a cannon? At $5/ticket it'd be PURE PROFIT, BABY!!
heyyy... maybe we've finally discovered what the "???" part of "The Plan" might actually be!!
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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.