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Final Season of Battlestar Galactica Confirmed
Ant writes "Via Dark Horizons, IESB reported from the 10th annual Saturn awards yesterday, and spoke with Battlestar Galactica stars Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff. Olmos confirmed that, as far as the show that's been running so far, the fourth season will be the last one. It's currently slated to start airing in January of 2008. 'Olmos says "This will probably be the most extraordinary season of 'Battlestar'. It's the final season, so it's definitely going to be the most vicious. As far as we know, in respects of the way we have this show constructed, this is the final season." Sackhoff says "I think part of the problem is that it's an expensive show. It is [a great show], but we don't have the viewership that a great show should get."'"
If they spent a fraction of the budget on writing an continuity as they had on post-production, I don't think we'd be having this discussion.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
well then you wouldn't be wasting time would you?
Your statement lacks internal consistancy.
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because I dislike the RIAA, MPAA, and other media conglomerate goons as much as the next guy, but Sci-Fi shows like Battlestar Galactica, but I am not surprised this is happening when half the people I know who watch the show, end up getting the episodes over the internet.
The everything should be free crowd is finding out the hard way that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Yah I hate commercials and skip through most of them with fast forward on my DVR (so yah I guess I am a hypocrite in a way), but expensive shows like Battlestar Galactica can't stick around if the investors in those shows cannot recoup their investment in some way. This should be blatantly obvious to the crowd of people who openly complain about legitimate issues like fair use and copying CD's or DVD's you already own for personal use (such as making backups), but at home they pirate everything they can get their hands on.
A lot of people don't realize the Battlestar Galactica was moved to Sunday night from Friday night, explicitly for the purpose of combatting a lot of the piracy of the show under the logic that your typical geek is more likely to watch it on Sunday night since it will be a water cooler discussion among his pals when he/she goes to work on Monday morning. The idea was that you won't have time to download and watch the episode (and get a full night worth of sleep), if you torrent it or DVR the episode and watch it later, unless you wanted to deal with hearing all the spoilers from your buddies at the office the next morning.
Perhaps this strategy failed and Battlestar Galactica's ratings suffered even worse, but there is so much pirating and DVR'ing of the episode that it is really hard to say. I DVR just about everything I watch and usually end up watching shows several days after I recorded them, but I also realize that you are not going to get a lot of time sensitive commercial advertising being sold if some company is having a sale on a particular day in the near future and if people even see the commercial at all (due to fast forwarding), it might be too late.
This is happening to all of the most popular geek shows (Lost and Heroes as well), and what will end up inevitably happening is that the Sci-Fi genre will inevitably die just like like George Lucas has predicted for the movie industry at large (though Spider-Man 3 so far seems to challenge that conventional wisdom).
Sadly, a lot of people complain about the RIAA, MPAA, or any media company is just desperately holding onto old business models for the sake of profit, however, those are the only proven business models that actually work. If a business model ends up dying, then the business itself will end up dying if there is not another viable business model to replace it. Simply put, if investors cannot get a return on their investment from the television, or movie business, then they will inevitably dump their money into more profitable investments like oil or real estate.
So the way I see it, we have several options:
(1) Continue things as is and allow rampant piracy to continue as normal. The entertainment industry either totally implodes into nothing or else contracts to a point that "pop culture" and "celebrities" no longer exists. Maybe that is a good thing, but on the flip side your Friday night entertainment may be reduced to seeing who uploaded the most juvenile, retarded, low-brow video up to YouTube that night.
(2) Crack down hard on piracy without giving the consumers at large any say in the matter (i.e. circumventing the democratic process through lobbying and outright bribes in Washington, not to mention other Gestapo tactics). This is a lose-lose as the entertainment industry has found out the hard way as it throws the idea of fair use out the window and also prevents the reselling of CD's, DVD's or other media you no longer have any use for. That is like saying to someone they can buy a car, but that it is illegal to resell the car.
(3) Establish some sort of national media library for digit