If a year later you find a duff disc, buy the set again and then just swap out the duff disc and return it to your online retailer for a refund. They'll return the whole thing to the manufacturer for a credit. My target price for complete boxsets ? £45 on DVD, £60-£75 on Bluray...
That's speculation. New series get that kind of money. And that's only for some episodes. Most numbers are rumors anyways, and those are not in the hundreds of thousand. On top of my head I don't remember any series getting 200k per episode. We have no idea how much money TNG-R is getting. TNG was already available on Netflix. So if at all, you could only count the difference towards TNG-Rs budget.
It's informed speculation. HULU paid nearly $400,000 per episode for HD CSI and nearly $900,000 an episode for HD Seinfeld earlier this year. The 2011 Netflix deal for Trek in a mix of both HD and SD content (which coincidentally was inked just before the TNG remastering commenced) was up for renewal (these streaming deals only last for a few years) and when that happens, the streaming companies have to pay up again. More for HD content. If anything, $100,000 per episode for TNG is conservative given its relatively high profile.
Even if it's as low as 100,000 per episode, that's roughly 17,800,000 for the whole run. Which is well over what it cost to produce. (Do I remember correctly that it cost 9 million to remaster TNG?) If those numbers are even remotely accurate, the idea of HD DS9/VOY isn't that ridiculous as a "maybe some day" scenario.
HULU paid that money for *EXCLUSIVE* streaming rights, for two shows that were far more popular than any Star Trek series. These were also some of the first deals of their kind, as streaming is very much still in its infancy. There's nothing about any of that to base some magical $100,000 per episode rumor on.
If Hulu had paid that kind of fee for Star Trek, it would have been news. Prologic9 is absolutely right.
100k does not sound low or conservative to me. But that would also be specualtion. Anyway, you can count all of that money towards the remastering project. Only part of it. And we are talking about TNG, thes second "crown-jewel" of Star Trek. DS9, Voyager and Enterprise may be worth a lot less. Newer series, that currently air, and have an active fanbase, like Arrow or Supernatural, get reportedly around 1,5k per episode. That is true as well, Seinfeld is exclusive. But that deal was actually pretty recent. I think Seinfeld and CSI have a bigger share in the current U.S. mindset than DS9. Yeah, you pay a monthly fee. The amount depends on the number of devices you want to use it on whether you want to have HD or not.
One thing we know is they don't specifically pay anything for it, Trek is part of CBS's bulk licensing agreement. These deals so far have lasted for 2 years (starting 4 years ago), and there was some speculation CBS might discontinue them this Summer if their own streaming service was a hit. Thankfully it wasn't, and with a slew of new CBS content having hit Netflix it's safe to assume they renewed again.
Although in the short term, HD remastering clearly isn't happening, i will continue to hold out hope that technological improvements may make remastering cheaper. Maybe teaching a computer how to make Odo transform could be a matter of a few hours once, that would be good for the whole series, for instance. And gradually audiences will refuse to watch low definition, much like audiences tend to react badly to black and white, no matter how good the movie is. Perhaps DS9 won't get Blu-Ray, but instead maybe in 8 years it'll be the first to get a 4k remaster.
So much of the process cant be automated though. Searching out the original negatives from the archives, cleaning and scanning, digital fixing of scratches, tears, colour corrections and balancing, all BEFORE you even consider the effects., editing, sound. A machine that can scan an SD copy and automatically make a HD remaster would be fantastic, but is just not possible.
You're right, of course. Which is why I was thinking nearly a factor of ten less than the Seinfeld deal. Even if it were only $50,000 per episode (which is nearly a factor of ten less than the CSI deal and nearly as much as the remastering itself cost per episode) we're still talking about close to $9 million. But yes, I'm just speculating here based on the dollar amounts that have been reported in other streaming deals. It's all we have to go on really. If you happen to know a ballpark figure of how much Netflix pays for non-exclusive streaming rights, I would of course love to see it. Am I yet another factor of ten off from $50,000? That too seems unlikely. However, back to my original point, I still don't think there is any basis for believing TNG-R has been a financial loss for CBS. Once you add up all the revenue streams, worldwide Blu-ray sales, the SyFy and BBC America broadcast deals, HULU, Amazon, and now Netflix. They're still not in the black? I find that very difficult to believe. In fact, I find it very difficult to believe CBS would have attempted the project in the first place if they hadn't already received that influx of cash from the 2011 Netflix deal or at least secured future distribution rights beforehand that would have guaranteed the project would see profit by the time it was completed (or shortly after).
I don't think it lost money. But I also don't think it was the winner CBS projected it to be when they went forward with the project.
It's also worth remembering that any calculation will have been based on not the streaming revenue for TNG but the difference in revenue between the new remastered and old SD versions. Sure they might be paying 50k per episode for TNG remastered, but if they previously paid 47k, that doesn't cover the coffee bill. With DS9, which is vastly less popular, it is an even worse difference for them. We are now all saying "yeah but TNG probably made money" - and heck, lets take that as read, but TNG was more popular. Basically, people who do have all the sums with the actual figures have decided not to do it (for now at the very least), the simplest conclusion is therefore they are projecting they would not make enough money to make it work. A basic rule of business is that if you are breaking even then you are probably losing money somewhere and your business will fail eventually. Nobody sets up any business project to just about make money. They will be expecting a significant return within three years, or no remastering project...