Yeah, sorry I went bonkers there. I got myself into a massive, massive fight with someone earlier today about the same subject (despite my best efforts to stay calm) and I think I'm a bit trigger-happy right now.
There is a real problem with how people protect their investment these days. Treating customers like criminals just makes it seem like being a criminal is not that big a deal.
I should stick to coding. There's less politics to it. (ha!)
you're actively restricting people from doing things they should be free to do.
I may be daft, but I was under the impression that the Creative Commons licenses were a way to make it clear to people what type of uses they could make of particular works... which is to say: I have content that can be used commercially, so you can print it out and sell it on the street corner. But I have one that I don't let you use commercially (at least not without permission)... so if you want to print out THAT content and sell it on a street corner, you're messin' with my stuff.
The idea is not to restrict how other people use content, it's to restrict how other busineses use content. Once you try and earn money off of someone else's efforts, you've crossed the line into being a "business". If we both write stories about sea turtles, and you can just willy-nilly reprint all my sea turtle stories without fear, you'll be riding off my hard work, and that's no good. Copyright is meant to protect me from you re-selling my work, and CC is meant to clarify the terms I set out.
I've had this battle a few times in recent days with people, so it's fresh in my mind: if you read a book or watch a movie that you really enjoy, you're not obligated to pay for it, but you are obliged to. In the olden days that was a blurred line because the message was glued to the medium, but today we have to learn to distinguish the two concepts. The waters are all muddied because of large corps smashing consumers like they're competitors, but the truth is that copyright is useful for protecting artists from evil-doers (like... well, the large corps).
Actually, the Privacy Commissioner will probably get this killed quite quickly (if it ever progresses past its current state, which is unlikely).
[Basically, IC and PCH futz around for a few years developing grandiose plans related to hot topics of the day, and then someone mentions that half of the Strategis website is available only in English, and they run around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to cover it up, completely forgetting everything they've worked on previously.]
The Privacy Commissioner will get to check over any proposals before they make it to a proper committee, and that's when the scary stuff'll be aired, Lloyd Robertson will make you scared to go to bed at night, and the government will take two giant steps away from it like they never knew anyone was proposing such rubbish in the first place.
Which is not to say you can't write in and vent, but you have to allow for the brilliant inefficiencies of Canadian government to take effect before you march on Parliament Hill.
Poll update time! Updated numbers as of 10:41 PST this fine Monday morning... the stats have swung around quite broadly now... with 1209 respondents, is goes as follows: $2.00 - 311 $1.75 - 40 $1.50 - 142 $1.25 - 227 $1.15 - 160 $0.99 - 173 less than $0.99 - 156
So now the question I have (and you can ponder on your own) is this: if iTunes sells a compressed audio file for $0.99, but 329 of you think an episode of a series should sell for that much (or less)... which is the issue: are you under-valuing the episode, or is $0.99 too much to pay for a song? Any other insights, drop me a line. I'll be updating the site with some more content tonight (to respond to some interesting emails I've received).
's true, but in the absence of definition like that (so I guess assume a middle-of-the-road premise) what would you pay? $1 ($0.99) is starting to become the average, which is interesting.
Another interesting idea that ties into the music industry wanting to raise download prices lately... if Futurama started off as $0.99, but built the same cult following, do you think they could increase the price to $2 later? I would think that in this model, your audience numbers would be your cap, so you wouldn't be able to exceed a certain profit margin without decreasing production costs or increasing the price...
Actually, to further comment on the other reply to my comment... given that your audience numbers are critical to your success in a more direct way than on TV, I would think you'd be living on message boards reading every last comment so you could keep them happy... while not directly at the mercy of your fans, you'd be stupid to ignore them wholesale.
Yeah, that's a very good point. The assumption I was going on was that the show would be produced by the creative people closest to the front lines, as opposed to the suits wanting another revenue stream...
I don't think that a production company could give in to demands from the audience (any more than usual, where they may play with storylines to make their fans happy), and moreover you would think that with a smaller and more focused fan base, their writing and creative direction would end up even more targeted and appealing than before.
It'll end up being a matter of trust, I reckon. As people have said, if JMS or Joss Whedon were to pitch a show in this manner, they'd probably get a flood of subscriptions in a few days. And even if you, as a fan, think some episodes aren't quite to your liking, you'd have faith that it's all part of some plan. If they abuse the trust, they'll lose the ability to make shows in the future... but that's no different than how it works now.
And more bluntly, I would expect that anyone doing this kind of thing would just flat-out say "we don't do requests". As a fan of Firefly, I personally wouldn't WANT fans to have control over the storylines, because we'd just botch it up. Hopefully that point of view isn't mine alone...
This came up a few days ago with the "pay-per-view series" story, and in a thread attached there some of us contemplated something of a plan to actually make a series based on fan interest... like a middleman-less version of broadcast TV.
Along those lines, I made a page outlining the "business plan" and asked for input as to how much you personally would pay per episode of a particular show. I did it kind of late in the game, though, so only about 400 people saw it. I'd like to increase the sample if I could...
The idea related to TFA is this: if you have a block of fans that are fanatical enough to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures, to pull a sinking series out of the abyss... why not actually give them what they want? If you get subscriptions for a season of a show from enough people, you can easily produce a show, and you will make bigger profits than before while still giving the fans what they want. Especially in sci-fi, where the audience is more internet-aware and a lot more passionate, this seems like a great solution for all parties.
Anyway, if you'll at least take the time to vote at the bottom of that page, it would be very interesting to see how Enterprise's target audience actually feels about the idea.
Just to give you an update on the statistics... since I posted that link last night, about 200 people have said they would pay $2 for a show 6 months from now. If you consider there were almost 70,000 hits to my site in the same time period stemming from from the URL in my profile, that's a reasonably low number, and I would think it means that people either don't like clicking on links in Slashdot posts, or they think $2 is too much.
So! I've further developed the plan, and if you're floating about, please visit this page and vote at the bottom so I can get a sense of what types of prices everyone is comfortable with.
You would think that, but I've noticed that people seem to be a lot more stingy about something repeating than a one-off. If I were to say you could download a movie for $5, a lot of people would say it's a great deal. If I were to say you could download 13 episodes of a show for $1/each, lots of people would balk at the $13 price tag for some reason. Even if you gave the same amount of a preview, people still seem to want to see X% of a show/movie as a warm-up before they'll invest in it. I'm not sure wehere that concept comes from, but it's probably based on how new TV seasons start off... the weak die off and the rest become hits.
Out of curiosity... what would you think a decent resolution would be for this kind of thing... and also (open to anyone still reading) would you think it would be possible to make some sort of bittorrent hybrid system where a "broadcaster" would release an episode, the clients with "subscriptions" would find the file, and download in the standard torrent way?
I'm trying to figure the economics of this kind of thing... as compared to music where I have less experience, I would say that if the cost of distribution were $0.10 per episode and the producers themselves distribute, you would need an audience of about 340,000 to break even on this. Which is not so bad, I think.
But if I made an episode and only earned $20,000 profit from it, in most cases I wouldn't be able to afford to make a second episode. So how about this: for smaller-run, HBO-type shows, would you pay MORE, or would you insist on $0.99 per episode?
I realize that for music, there has been a big reluctance by many to fully account for where all the money goes in the production, but having budgeted a show recently, I can say that $300,000 for an episode (animated, mind you, and high production values) is somewhat necessary. And in our structure, that completely disregards the idea of producers taking a cut... that money goes straight to the people generating content.
So to make a series self-sustaining (as a priority above profit), we would need to charge those 340,000 people about $1.80 for the episode if we were to have any confidence we could produce a second episode. Naturally, if we had an audience double that size, we could go to $0.99... but for many of us, that might not be possible for a while.
Difficult questions, non? But I like the idea of the subscription download system as you described. That's almost broadcasting, in a totally different way...
Okay, just to conduct a survey of sorts... if you (speaking into camera) would pay $2 now for a show 6 months from now, prease to clicky-click on my link here and I will let y'all know how many people feel the same way. I've already counted myself, because I'm like you, but I'm curious how many others are...
(btw: the linked page simply records a hit to a database table, and is not all that exciting to look at, so don't be disappointed)
Not at all a side note... I had forgotten about that... so here are my questions to you as a consumer of said goods: - what would be your upper limit for paying for a season? $10? $20? - if Kevin Spacey were the star of the series (but really, wouldn't that be cool?), would you pay more? - what would you prefer, Coke cans in-show or a commercial break with a 30-second Coke spot?
And the big one: if they DID put Coke cans in-episode in an obviously advertising sorta way, how would it change your answer to the first question?
(I first must ask all to NOT click on the URL in my profile, because it's not meant to be related and I'm too lazy to change it...)
I want to make a show. It'll be a cool show, and you all will love it. To make 13 episodes, I will need to raise at least $3,900,000. Let's say the price'll be $3/episode. Pre-pay me now... just $39, and if 100,000 of you do, we'll make the show available for download, HD quality, on the web. So go ahead, send the money... you'll love the show.
The problem of course is that no one will pay to watch a show they don't trust to be good, so this scenario only works for established shows everyone likes. Not that you implied it, but purely on its own, you'll never get innovation in drama this way, because everyone will be trying to make cookie cutter projects to make the pre-payment a safe investment for consumers. So there has to be a first part to this theory that makes it possible to get to what you describe...
But I do agree, it would be a better way to do the Enterprise fiasco... don't DONATE $36M, just prepay for the DVDs. But of course that's not what Paramount wants... they want to bleed every dollar they can out of this show, so you've gotta pay your $30 donation plus another round of cash when the DVDs come out...
There's something really brilliant in all this, but I don't think anyone's been able to pick it out yet...
From the website: ...the money, minus transactional fees charged to us, is donated to Paramount/Viacom... (emphasis mine)
Doesn't it sound just a little stupid when you phrase it like that? I mean, even with JMS working on it, why would anyone donate money to an organization that obviously didn't see the worth in producing the show in the first place?
Let me turn this around: if Paramount produced a season of Enterprise and released it exclusively on DVD for $40, and every one of the supposed 3 million fans bought it, they'd have $120,000,000 in the bank! The problem here is not that there aren't 3 million fans, it's that Paramount doesn't want to keep turning out episodes for minimal returns and a (likely) shrinking fan base.
Hybrid solution here: donate your 3 million fans' $12 to JMS, and let him make whatever he wants with it. It won't be Trek, but it won't be held at the mercy of a corporation that doesn't see the value in the show in the first place.
Montcalm, that was my alias back then. Good ole days. Actually, the teaser we did has a funny story... we spent gobs of cash paying a storyboarder to make the teaser based on a script we compiled (some episode shots, some just-for-the-teaser shots). The storyboard was behind schedule, but we still passed it on to the animators... five people... and they had a month to do the work. Silly us, we didn't hound them endlessly for the entire month, and at the end, only one person had done any work, and it completely disregarded the storyboard. 100%. Nothing the same at all.
So Spin (co-creator) and I cracked open our copies of 3DS and stitched together the teaser over a weekend (cause we'd promised it would come out that Sunday). We only knew 3DS enough to rotate and render models at the time. There were supposed to be a few dozen character shots in the trailer that we had to cut out because we didn't know how to animate characters at all. It was hellish. 3 days of no sleep at all, and we put it out. The quality of the show now makes that old teaser look as goofy as it really was.
As for disagreeing with the DR cause... yeah, that wasn't even my doing (though I did stoke the fires somewhat from time to time). And the new scripts actually deal more with that aspect of things, so hopefully you'll feel your comments were appreciated after all:)
Ooooh, trust me, I'd love to do a full postmortem on the damn show. Not that it's dead. To give a brief (and off topic, of course) summary of how things progressed...
We were about to actually launch the show back in 2001 as planned when we were approached by an animation studio that wanted to put it on TV for real money, as opposed to our trying to trailblaze the whole way along. That would have worked out stupendously except that the company shelved our idea quite quickly and kept the worldwide rights for 2 years (not unusual, but quite obnoxious since that left me, personally, as the sole proprietor of the massive dotcom-type debt that the company had developed over the previous year).
Just as the rights were about to revert back to the original owners, the company basically shuffled us off to another company that was equally exciting, and so the show developed a bit more, and I think you'd probably seen at least one resurgence during that time where we were marketing rather than trying to run the same old game we had before (which was damn fun to create and maintain, I must say). The downside to this is that they wanted to hack apart the concept to fit some misconceptions about what geeks wanted (hence the Ewoks Incident).
That went nowhere, so I got the rights back, and tried to gather up enough sheer grumpiness to push the thing to completion (we were still very close to being done, so hey, why not just tweak it and be on our way?). Not so easy. First, there were legal issues that came up as to ownership of assets (now fully resolved), and right after I put up what was to be the definitive DSR site, one of my kidneys collapsed into utter disaster and I was too drugged up for the better part of a year to care about spaceships anymore.
Of course things are cyclical, and in the past six months another animation company has tried to shop the show in Europe with great tentative success, but nothing worth selling the rights for. So instead we (some of the founders and I) took the idea back to the base and asked if we could make the show for real this time, the way we wanted to in the first place, and just get it done.
So I'm not putting up a proper site again until we're further along. The first episode grew from 22 minutes to a little under 120. The story is more mature, the themes are more complex, and it's generally more of what I think the Typhies of old wanted to see. But it's kind of slow-going yet. People are working on it on their spare time, between other jobs, just hacking away. I liken it to the Firefox approach... it may be invisible to most people for a long time, but eventually it'll make waves.
Anyway, long story short: when we've got the first 33 minutes done, Dustrunners'll be out over torrent in xvid or something (one nice thing about the passage of time is that the technology has finally caught up to our dream... downloading an hour-long movie isn't as terrifying as it was in 2001)... and we can get on with our lives. I really am sorry about all the yo-yo antics. In hindsight, it would've been better to just stick to our guns and release the thing on the web in the first place. But that's the kind of thing you don't really appreciate when someone's tossing threats of massive wealth and NBC in your face:)
Gee, thanks for calling the majority of humanity 'fanatics,' 'irrational' and 'unenlightened.'
Sorry that it came across that way... I was actually meaning to imply that to the person I was replying to (and people like him), religion seems irrational. I'm not religious, but I'm not anti-religion. I appreciate that many people believe many things, and that any number of them may be dead-on with their faith. Which is why I think that assuming that religion will one day disappear is a bad premise. And that's why good sci-fi should explore the world that exists in the future in an honest way: realizing that you can't ever convince someone that their god doesn't exist, because you'll never make your science religion seem more real than their ancient one.
I was arguing the fact that religion is an important part of society (human or not), and that it belongs as at least an existant part of sci-fi. My wording may have been catering too much to the pro-science side of things. I guess my point was that (to use you as a reference)... if someone who is intelligent and knowledgeable about science believes in religion in these "advanced" times, you have to assume that religion is too relevant and robust to just disappear in the face of advanced technology.
Well I'll be a monkey's uncle. Indeed you're right. I must've read that a hundred times but never processed what it was saying. Well then! Revision #244! Thanks for noticing that!
Hmm. I should take note of this: three days of waiting on clients, and all it takes to get them to reply to me is to publicly propose to undertake a fun project unrelated to money...
So instead of... the full version which I'd have to re-assemble out of a few dozen wiki entries, howzabout I send you to my mangled prosed-up version instead? It stops around 2030 and doesn't cover the issue at hand directly, but it's still fun.
I would have to edit the content somewhat since it kinda served as the blueprint for this show we're making (it reads like a bunch of spoilers past a certain point), but yeah. I'll see what I can dig up...
A friend of mine wrote up this massive history of the world starting in 2001 and going until 2100, covering society and technology as it evolves bit by bit. He did this in 2001, and so far he's had a stunningly good track record of hitting actual events within several months of reality. He got the actual month of Spaceship One winning the X-Prize, predicted the ESA would lose a probe to Mars... and he predicted something very similar to this announcement happening in early 2005 as well...
I'm not saying he's Nostradamus or anything, but... um... if you live in France, now might be a good time to move abroad...
understanding of the world around us that science reveals that contradicts the mythology of religion.
Yes, but it's the fact that those who depend on religion never give it up in the face of science that makes history so interesting. And by extension, that's what makes it so interesting when sci-fi evokes religion, rather than just dismissing it as something for the unenlightened. Smaller mp3 players aren't the issue as much as the camera that steals your soul, and how the people that believe that react to a world where cameras are everywhere.
I'm not a religious person at all, but your reaction to the concept of religion existing in the future is what makes it good drama: you think that it's irrational, but you have this gnawing feeling deep down inside that there will still be a good population of religious fanatics no matter how advanced our science becomes. That's why it's so great to have religion in sci-fi. Tension beyond compare.
Only if you're a religionist. For a rational person, I don't see the appeal? Science trumps religion. BSG examining religious issues is like if Star Trek examined issues surrounding the Pasteurization of milk. It's anachronistic.
The most interesting thing about religion is how it manages to survive in one form or another throughout so much change. One would think that humans getting such a handle on the science of life and physics would have obliterated religion, but it keeps on truckin' all the same.
The thing that makes religion so interesting in sci-fi is that you can explore the continuing tensions between technology and faith as technology evolves... seeing how the faithful adapt is very interesting fiction.
Society hasn't really changed for several thousand years, it's just learned to re-adjust itself in the face of technological progress. That's what's fun to project into the future... how do we (or aliens for that matter) cope with the things we've created?
Indeed. I like to look at it in the Star Trek sense: TNG was not a continuation of TOS, it so it had its own unique first season. It's almost an insult to this new GB to be connected to the older one, non?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, sorry I went bonkers there. I got myself into a massive, massive fight with someone earlier today about the same subject (despite my best efforts to stay calm) and I think I'm a bit trigger-happy right now.
There is a real problem with how people protect their investment these days. Treating customers like criminals just makes it seem like being a criminal is not that big a deal.
I should stick to coding. There's less politics to it. (ha!)
you're actively restricting people from doing things they should be free to do.
I may be daft, but I was under the impression that the Creative Commons licenses were a way to make it clear to people what type of uses they could make of particular works... which is to say: I have content that can be used commercially, so you can print it out and sell it on the street corner. But I have one that I don't let you use commercially (at least not without permission)... so if you want to print out THAT content and sell it on a street corner, you're messin' with my stuff.
The idea is not to restrict how other people use content, it's to restrict how other busineses use content. Once you try and earn money off of someone else's efforts, you've crossed the line into being a "business". If we both write stories about sea turtles, and you can just willy-nilly reprint all my sea turtle stories without fear, you'll be riding off my hard work, and that's no good. Copyright is meant to protect me from you re-selling my work, and CC is meant to clarify the terms I set out.
I've had this battle a few times in recent days with people, so it's fresh in my mind: if you read a book or watch a movie that you really enjoy, you're not obligated to pay for it, but you are obliged to. In the olden days that was a blurred line because the message was glued to the medium, but today we have to learn to distinguish the two concepts. The waters are all muddied because of large corps smashing consumers like they're competitors, but the truth is that copyright is useful for protecting artists from evil-doers (like... well, the large corps).
Actually, the Privacy Commissioner will probably get this killed quite quickly (if it ever progresses past its current state, which is unlikely).
[Basically, IC and PCH futz around for a few years developing grandiose plans related to hot topics of the day, and then someone mentions that half of the Strategis website is available only in English, and they run around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to cover it up, completely forgetting everything they've worked on previously.]
The Privacy Commissioner will get to check over any proposals before they make it to a proper committee, and that's when the scary stuff'll be aired, Lloyd Robertson will make you scared to go to bed at night, and the government will take two giant steps away from it like they never knew anyone was proposing such rubbish in the first place.
Which is not to say you can't write in and vent, but you have to allow for the brilliant inefficiencies of Canadian government to take effect before you march on Parliament Hill.
Poll update time! Updated numbers as of 10:41 PST this fine Monday morning... the stats have swung around quite broadly now... with 1209 respondents, is goes as follows:
$2.00 - 311
$1.75 - 40
$1.50 - 142
$1.25 - 227
$1.15 - 160
$0.99 - 173
less than $0.99 - 156
So now the question I have (and you can ponder on your own) is this: if iTunes sells a compressed audio file for $0.99, but 329 of you think an episode of a series should sell for that much (or less)... which is the issue: are you under-valuing the episode, or is $0.99 too much to pay for a song? Any other insights, drop me a line. I'll be updating the site with some more content tonight (to respond to some interesting emails I've received).
's true, but in the absence of definition like that (so I guess assume a middle-of-the-road premise) what would you pay? $1 ($0.99) is starting to become the average, which is interesting.
Another interesting idea that ties into the music industry wanting to raise download prices lately... if Futurama started off as $0.99, but built the same cult following, do you think they could increase the price to $2 later? I would think that in this model, your audience numbers would be your cap, so you wouldn't be able to exceed a certain profit margin without decreasing production costs or increasing the price...
Actually, to further comment on the other reply to my comment... given that your audience numbers are critical to your success in a more direct way than on TV, I would think you'd be living on message boards reading every last comment so you could keep them happy... while not directly at the mercy of your fans, you'd be stupid to ignore them wholesale.
Yeah, that's a very good point. The assumption I was going on was that the show would be produced by the creative people closest to the front lines, as opposed to the suits wanting another revenue stream...
I don't think that a production company could give in to demands from the audience (any more than usual, where they may play with storylines to make their fans happy), and moreover you would think that with a smaller and more focused fan base, their writing and creative direction would end up even more targeted and appealing than before.
It'll end up being a matter of trust, I reckon. As people have said, if JMS or Joss Whedon were to pitch a show in this manner, they'd probably get a flood of subscriptions in a few days. And even if you, as a fan, think some episodes aren't quite to your liking, you'd have faith that it's all part of some plan. If they abuse the trust, they'll lose the ability to make shows in the future... but that's no different than how it works now.
And more bluntly, I would expect that anyone doing this kind of thing would just flat-out say "we don't do requests". As a fan of Firefly, I personally wouldn't WANT fans to have control over the storylines, because we'd just botch it up. Hopefully that point of view isn't mine alone...
This came up a few days ago with the "pay-per-view series" story, and in a thread attached there some of us contemplated something of a plan to actually make a series based on fan interest... like a middleman-less version of broadcast TV.
Along those lines, I made a page outlining the "business plan" and asked for input as to how much you personally would pay per episode of a particular show. I did it kind of late in the game, though, so only about 400 people saw it. I'd like to increase the sample if I could...
The idea related to TFA is this: if you have a block of fans that are fanatical enough to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures, to pull a sinking series out of the abyss... why not actually give them what they want? If you get subscriptions for a season of a show from enough people, you can easily produce a show, and you will make bigger profits than before while still giving the fans what they want. Especially in sci-fi, where the audience is more internet-aware and a lot more passionate, this seems like a great solution for all parties.
Anyway, if you'll at least take the time to vote at the bottom of that page, it would be very interesting to see how Enterprise's target audience actually feels about the idea.
Just to give you an update on the statistics... since I posted that link last night, about 200 people have said they would pay $2 for a show 6 months from now. If you consider there were almost 70,000 hits to my site in the same time period stemming from from the URL in my profile, that's a reasonably low number, and I would think it means that people either don't like clicking on links in Slashdot posts, or they think $2 is too much.
So! I've further developed the plan, and if you're floating about, please visit this page and vote at the bottom so I can get a sense of what types of prices everyone is comfortable with.
You would think that, but I've noticed that people seem to be a lot more stingy about something repeating than a one-off. If I were to say you could download a movie for $5, a lot of people would say it's a great deal. If I were to say you could download 13 episodes of a show for $1/each, lots of people would balk at the $13 price tag for some reason. Even if you gave the same amount of a preview, people still seem to want to see X% of a show/movie as a warm-up before they'll invest in it. I'm not sure wehere that concept comes from, but it's probably based on how new TV seasons start off... the weak die off and the rest become hits.
Out of curiosity... what would you think a decent resolution would be for this kind of thing... and also (open to anyone still reading) would you think it would be possible to make some sort of bittorrent hybrid system where a "broadcaster" would release an episode, the clients with "subscriptions" would find the file, and download in the standard torrent way?
I'm trying to figure the economics of this kind of thing... as compared to music where I have less experience, I would say that if the cost of distribution were $0.10 per episode and the producers themselves distribute, you would need an audience of about 340,000 to break even on this. Which is not so bad, I think.
But if I made an episode and only earned $20,000 profit from it, in most cases I wouldn't be able to afford to make a second episode. So how about this: for smaller-run, HBO-type shows, would you pay MORE, or would you insist on $0.99 per episode?
I realize that for music, there has been a big reluctance by many to fully account for where all the money goes in the production, but having budgeted a show recently, I can say that $300,000 for an episode (animated, mind you, and high production values) is somewhat necessary. And in our structure, that completely disregards the idea of producers taking a cut... that money goes straight to the people generating content.
So to make a series self-sustaining (as a priority above profit), we would need to charge those 340,000 people about $1.80 for the episode if we were to have any confidence we could produce a second episode. Naturally, if we had an audience double that size, we could go to $0.99... but for many of us, that might not be possible for a while.
Difficult questions, non? But I like the idea of the subscription download system as you described. That's almost broadcasting, in a totally different way...
Okay, just to conduct a survey of sorts... if you (speaking into camera) would pay $2 now for a show 6 months from now, prease to clicky-click on my link here and I will let y'all know how many people feel the same way. I've already counted myself, because I'm like you, but I'm curious how many others are...
(btw: the linked page simply records a hit to a database table, and is not all that exciting to look at, so don't be disappointed)
Not at all a side note... I had forgotten about that... so here are my questions to you as a consumer of said goods:
- what would be your upper limit for paying for a season? $10? $20?
- if Kevin Spacey were the star of the series (but really, wouldn't that be cool?), would you pay more?
- what would you prefer, Coke cans in-show or a commercial break with a 30-second Coke spot?
And the big one: if they DID put Coke cans in-episode in an obviously advertising sorta way, how would it change your answer to the first question?
(I first must ask all to NOT click on the URL in my profile, because it's not meant to be related and I'm too lazy to change it...)
I want to make a show. It'll be a cool show, and you all will love it. To make 13 episodes, I will need to raise at least $3,900,000. Let's say the price'll be $3/episode. Pre-pay me now... just $39, and if 100,000 of you do, we'll make the show available for download, HD quality, on the web. So go ahead, send the money... you'll love the show.
The problem of course is that no one will pay to watch a show they don't trust to be good, so this scenario only works for established shows everyone likes. Not that you implied it, but purely on its own, you'll never get innovation in drama this way, because everyone will be trying to make cookie cutter projects to make the pre-payment a safe investment for consumers. So there has to be a first part to this theory that makes it possible to get to what you describe...
But I do agree, it would be a better way to do the Enterprise fiasco... don't DONATE $36M, just prepay for the DVDs. But of course that's not what Paramount wants... they want to bleed every dollar they can out of this show, so you've gotta pay your $30 donation plus another round of cash when the DVDs come out...
There's something really brilliant in all this, but I don't think anyone's been able to pick it out yet...
From the website:
...the money, minus transactional fees charged to us, is donated to Paramount/Viacom...
(emphasis mine)
Doesn't it sound just a little stupid when you phrase it like that? I mean, even with JMS working on it, why would anyone donate money to an organization that obviously didn't see the worth in producing the show in the first place?
Let me turn this around: if Paramount produced a season of Enterprise and released it exclusively on DVD for $40, and every one of the supposed 3 million fans bought it, they'd have $120,000,000 in the bank! The problem here is not that there aren't 3 million fans, it's that Paramount doesn't want to keep turning out episodes for minimal returns and a (likely) shrinking fan base.
Hybrid solution here: donate your 3 million fans' $12 to JMS, and let him make whatever he wants with it. It won't be Trek, but it won't be held at the mercy of a corporation that doesn't see the value in the show in the first place.
Montcalm, that was my alias back then. Good ole days. Actually, the teaser we did has a funny story... we spent gobs of cash paying a storyboarder to make the teaser based on a script we compiled (some episode shots, some just-for-the-teaser shots). The storyboard was behind schedule, but we still passed it on to the animators... five people... and they had a month to do the work. Silly us, we didn't hound them endlessly for the entire month, and at the end, only one person had done any work, and it completely disregarded the storyboard. 100%. Nothing the same at all.
:)
So Spin (co-creator) and I cracked open our copies of 3DS and stitched together the teaser over a weekend (cause we'd promised it would come out that Sunday). We only knew 3DS enough to rotate and render models at the time. There were supposed to be a few dozen character shots in the trailer that we had to cut out because we didn't know how to animate characters at all. It was hellish. 3 days of no sleep at all, and we put it out. The quality of the show now makes that old teaser look as goofy as it really was.
As for disagreeing with the DR cause... yeah, that wasn't even my doing (though I did stoke the fires somewhat from time to time). And the new scripts actually deal more with that aspect of things, so hopefully you'll feel your comments were appreciated after all
Ooooh, trust me, I'd love to do a full postmortem on the damn show. Not that it's dead. To give a brief (and off topic, of course) summary of how things progressed...
:)
We were about to actually launch the show back in 2001 as planned when we were approached by an animation studio that wanted to put it on TV for real money, as opposed to our trying to trailblaze the whole way along. That would have worked out stupendously except that the company shelved our idea quite quickly and kept the worldwide rights for 2 years (not unusual, but quite obnoxious since that left me, personally, as the sole proprietor of the massive dotcom-type debt that the company had developed over the previous year).
Just as the rights were about to revert back to the original owners, the company basically shuffled us off to another company that was equally exciting, and so the show developed a bit more, and I think you'd probably seen at least one resurgence during that time where we were marketing rather than trying to run the same old game we had before (which was damn fun to create and maintain, I must say). The downside to this is that they wanted to hack apart the concept to fit some misconceptions about what geeks wanted (hence the Ewoks Incident).
That went nowhere, so I got the rights back, and tried to gather up enough sheer grumpiness to push the thing to completion (we were still very close to being done, so hey, why not just tweak it and be on our way?). Not so easy. First, there were legal issues that came up as to ownership of assets (now fully resolved), and right after I put up what was to be the definitive DSR site, one of my kidneys collapsed into utter disaster and I was too drugged up for the better part of a year to care about spaceships anymore.
Of course things are cyclical, and in the past six months another animation company has tried to shop the show in Europe with great tentative success, but nothing worth selling the rights for. So instead we (some of the founders and I) took the idea back to the base and asked if we could make the show for real this time, the way we wanted to in the first place, and just get it done.
So I'm not putting up a proper site again until we're further along. The first episode grew from 22 minutes to a little under 120. The story is more mature, the themes are more complex, and it's generally more of what I think the Typhies of old wanted to see. But it's kind of slow-going yet. People are working on it on their spare time, between other jobs, just hacking away. I liken it to the Firefox approach... it may be invisible to most people for a long time, but eventually it'll make waves.
Anyway, long story short: when we've got the first 33 minutes done, Dustrunners'll be out over torrent in xvid or something (one nice thing about the passage of time is that the technology has finally caught up to our dream... downloading an hour-long movie isn't as terrifying as it was in 2001)... and we can get on with our lives. I really am sorry about all the yo-yo antics. In hindsight, it would've been better to just stick to our guns and release the thing on the web in the first place. But that's the kind of thing you don't really appreciate when someone's tossing threats of massive wealth and NBC in your face
Wow, I rambled. Anything else you want to know?
Gee, thanks for calling the majority of humanity 'fanatics,' 'irrational' and 'unenlightened.'
Sorry that it came across that way... I was actually meaning to imply that to the person I was replying to (and people like him), religion seems irrational. I'm not religious, but I'm not anti-religion. I appreciate that many people believe many things, and that any number of them may be dead-on with their faith. Which is why I think that assuming that religion will one day disappear is a bad premise. And that's why good sci-fi should explore the world that exists in the future in an honest way: realizing that you can't ever convince someone that their god doesn't exist, because you'll never make your science religion seem more real than their ancient one.
I was arguing the fact that religion is an important part of society (human or not), and that it belongs as at least an existant part of sci-fi. My wording may have been catering too much to the pro-science side of things. I guess my point was that (to use you as a reference)... if someone who is intelligent and knowledgeable about science believes in religion in these "advanced" times, you have to assume that religion is too relevant and robust to just disappear in the face of advanced technology.
Well I'll be a monkey's uncle. Indeed you're right. I must've read that a hundred times but never processed what it was saying. Well then! Revision #244! Thanks for noticing that!
Hmm. I should take note of this: three days of waiting on clients, and all it takes to get them to reply to me is to publicly propose to undertake a fun project unrelated to money...
So instead of... the full version which I'd have to re-assemble out of a few dozen wiki entries, howzabout I send you to my mangled prosed-up version instead? It stops around 2030 and doesn't cover the issue at hand directly, but it's still fun.
Sorry... the almighty buck beckons...
I would have to edit the content somewhat since it kinda served as the blueprint for this show we're making (it reads like a bunch of spoilers past a certain point), but yeah. I'll see what I can dig up...
Dont worry folks, I will be here all week.
's not what I hear...
A friend of mine wrote up this massive history of the world starting in 2001 and going until 2100, covering society and technology as it evolves bit by bit. He did this in 2001, and so far he's had a stunningly good track record of hitting actual events within several months of reality. He got the actual month of Spaceship One winning the X-Prize, predicted the ESA would lose a probe to Mars... and he predicted something very similar to this announcement happening in early 2005 as well...
I'm not saying he's Nostradamus or anything, but... um... if you live in France, now might be a good time to move abroad...
understanding of the world around us that science reveals that contradicts the mythology of religion.
Yes, but it's the fact that those who depend on religion never give it up in the face of science that makes history so interesting. And by extension, that's what makes it so interesting when sci-fi evokes religion, rather than just dismissing it as something for the unenlightened. Smaller mp3 players aren't the issue as much as the camera that steals your soul, and how the people that believe that react to a world where cameras are everywhere.
I'm not a religious person at all, but your reaction to the concept of religion existing in the future is what makes it good drama: you think that it's irrational, but you have this gnawing feeling deep down inside that there will still be a good population of religious fanatics no matter how advanced our science becomes. That's why it's so great to have religion in sci-fi. Tension beyond compare.
Only if you're a religionist. For a rational person, I don't see the appeal? Science trumps religion. BSG examining religious issues is like if Star Trek examined issues surrounding the Pasteurization of milk. It's anachronistic.
The most interesting thing about religion is how it manages to survive in one form or another throughout so much change. One would think that humans getting such a handle on the science of life and physics would have obliterated religion, but it keeps on truckin' all the same.
The thing that makes religion so interesting in sci-fi is that you can explore the continuing tensions between technology and faith as technology evolves... seeing how the faithful adapt is very interesting fiction.
Society hasn't really changed for several thousand years, it's just learned to re-adjust itself in the face of technological progress. That's what's fun to project into the future... how do we (or aliens for that matter) cope with the things we've created?
Indeed. I like to look at it in the Star Trek sense: TNG was not a continuation of TOS, it so it had its own unique first season. It's almost an insult to this new GB to be connected to the older one, non? :)