Would it really matter if the next Trek series were on linear TV?

[Gary7]

I wouldn't mind paying a $1 download fee, if it gives me the license to burn it to DVD so I can watch it again. If it's $1 per viewing, then forget it.

The whole entertainment landscape has changed. I have a feeling that what tends to be defined as "science fiction" now is not quite what it used to be. I'm sick of CGI saturated productions with very little story and character development. Every year, the pool of movies that I can honestly say that I like keeps diminishing. I've started going to the theaters about 2 times per year on average. The last thing that pulled me in was Avatar. It was amazing to see in 3D. But I soon learned that 3D is just a technology and that it's all about how it is put to use. So much junk has come out in 3D that hardly compares, based on what I've heard from so many people first hand.

[Temis the Vorta]

Sci fi would be a much better test case than soaps, which don't have nearly as high a % of online savvy audience (which is a double-edged sword due to increased risk of piracy).

A major hold-up with internet distribution of professionally produced series is that the ad revenue just isn't there. Sponsors are not willing to pay as much for online advertising as on TV.

LA Times on website soaps.

...the economics of such a move wouldn't be easy. Soap operas have large casts, writing staffs, producers and lots of sets. In other words, they're not cheap. A soap can cost as much as $50 million a year to produce.

The announcement from Prospect Park -- an entertainment company whose partners include former Disney executive Rich Frank that has aspirations of creating a Web entertainment giant -- was very sparse on the details of how it would pull off moving the two soaps from broadcast television to the Internet.

...

Both soaps average about 2.5 million viewers, a number that may be hard to reach online. Also advertising online is not as expensive as advertising on television.

...

Until the Internet as a distribution system and -- more important -- advertising on the Internet reach parity with television, the idea of network-like programming on the Web may be a plot better left to soap operas.

[wescrusherfan84]

i don't understand why we still have shows that play on linear TV why no film 22 hours of a season and put it right out on DVD? i hate to wait... with DVD you can watch as long as you want... start, stop, rewatch... i need DVD... something "REAL" no video file or stearming video... a easy DVD....

[Sean Aaron]

I was thinking about this idea as a way for someone like Joss Whedon to try to get a complete project made. If you funded it with a few pilot episodes where the studio takes a smaller risk and the subscriber audience is proven then you might be able to get the fans to make some kind of up-front subscription commitment which could convince the studio to take a bigger risk.

I think eventually you are going to see a PPV aspect to regular TV, but it might be awhile. I personally have no regular TV service: I don't have Sky or cable; nor do I pay TV License fees as a result. I would, however, be willing to essentially buy a box set of a series in advance if it was of interest...say Star Trek?

Given how well Apple's iTunes film rental service seems to work I definitely think this idea could have legs; just need to get the kit in everyone's lounges hooked up to the 'net to make it possible (I have a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV).

[jefferiestubes8]

Sean Aaron wrote:

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I think eventually you are going to see a PPV aspect to regular TV, but it might be awhile.

Just this week HULU announced an original series starting in August from producer/director Morgan Spurlock (Supersize me, & "30 Days").
It is similar to Netflix pickup of a new original series for 2012 with Kevin Spacey.
By the time the next Trek TV series is in development I think we will see CBS television license it in the USA or have it on an affiliate cable channel rather than CW. That license will probably be a subscription model of a streaming season pass like a NFL season pass just not $300. More like $20./season and I think maybe with 1 sponsor with 5 commercial slots for the show.
There I said it. I think they would start selling paid season passes while the pilot episode is in preproduction.

[Sean Aaron]

Seems fair and genre television is one with a good chance of success with that model.

[AviTrek]

wescrusherfan84 wrote:

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i don't understand why we still have shows that play on linear TV why no film 22 hours of a season and put it right out on DVD? i hate to wait... with DVD you can watch as long as you want... start, stop, rewatch... i need DVD... something "REAL" no video file or stearming video... a easy DVD....

The economics just aren't there yet. Selling ads generates A LOT of money. DVD/subscription models may work some day, but the market just isn't there yet.

jefferiestubes8 wrote:

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Just this week HULU announced an original series starting in August from producer/director Morgan Spurlock (Supersize me, & "30 Days").
It is similar to Netflix pickup of a new original series for 2012 with Kevin Spacey.
By the time the next Trek TV series is in development I think we will see CBS television license it in the USA or have it on an affiliate cable channel rather than CW. That license will probably be a subscription model of a streaming season pass like a NFL season pass just not $300. More like $20./season and I think maybe with 1 sponsor with 5 commercial slots for the show.
There I said it. I think they would start selling paid season passes while the pilot episode is in preproduction.

Let's think about that $20/season price. Let's take the iTunes model where the distributor keeps 30%(obviously other models are slightly different, but the revenue should be ballpark consistent). CBS makes $14/season/viewer. Falling Skies as an example has been averaging about 4 million viewers and has a budget of ~$2.5m/episode. That means that if every viewer would stick around and pay $14/season and Dreamworks made no profit, they could afford 22 episodes. But of course Dreamworks wants a profit, so make that 11 episodes. And there is no way everyone who currently watches "for free" will pay for a show, so now you're talking 5 episodes best case. Are you willing to pay $20/season for a 5 episode show? And in reality a show distributed in this model will appear as one of the most pirated shows online, so these numbers are optimistic. If you want to see this model work you will need to either cut the budget, increase the cost, or grow the viewer base. Since the 3rd option has failed to happen even on free shows, you're going to need to do #1 or #2. Hope you enjoy shows costing a lot more than $20/season or shows that look like old school Doctor Who.

[Sean Aaron]

AviTrek wrote:

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Are you willing to pay $20/season for a 5 episode show?

I'm willing to pay £5 for a feature film on DVD, so if the show was quality, sure. Hell, I paid nearly £30 for the first series of TNG and I only regard two of the episodes as watchable. 22 episode series is wayyy to much anyway; 12 or even 6 is a more resonable number.

[Temis the Vorta]

Here's another threat to online distribution of non-interactive scripted media: social media games, which are taking off in a big way.

Right now, their financial model is based on one percent of players buying virtual goods, but that's a shitty model (since it's based on a tiny percentage of players and everyone else is a freeloader) and since it's shitty, it's gotta change. Maybe the games can change to incentivize freeloaders to change their wicked ways, but I doubt it, since a major attraction of the games is that, well, they're free. And they appeal to casual gamers who are not going to be that strongly motivated to fork over money for an improved experience. If they care that much, they'd be playing real games, not FarmVille.

So the other way the games could go is to lure in serious brands with serious ad money, and not have the ads relegated to an afterthought that nobody clicks on. And that's a model they're perfectly positioned for, because the casual, mass-market gamer is effectively the same as the broadcast viewer market the big brands are already advertising to.

The achilles heel of advertising on a non-interactive online medium (TV on the internet) is that all you're doing is what you could do on TV, but more lamely - smaller screen, smaller audience, and an audience less tolerant for looking at ads.

The fact that you're in a non-interactive medium makes the audience less passive compared with the kind of zoned-out zombies who watch TV and just let the ads wash over them, even if they could zap them, which no doubt explains the weird phenomenon of nearly half of DVR viewers not zapping ads. An internet viewer's brain is not zombified but is already in interactive-mode, which is not what you want, unless your ads are interactive as well, and can take advantage of that.

Social media games can swoop right in and muscle online TV out of the picture, by integrating the ads into the games themselves, and make them far more powerful than either regular TV or online TV can hope to offer. Right now, the best examples I've found is Polyvore (a very loose game in which the products are the game) and WildTangent (which is making efforts to match advertisers and game content - Scoop Away in a game about keeping pets for instance.)

And I continue to be amazed that we're not seeing TV and movies in social media games. Why is there a Vampire Wars on Facebook but not a Vampire Diaries, which offers the possibility that "Damon," "Stefan" and "Elena" might actually show up in the game for you to interact with? Why aren't the same advertisers on the TV show being given ad slots in the game, and have their products integrated into the game?

And when that happens, what's the point of also having Vampire Diaries, the TV series, online? The advertisers will naturally prefer the greater impact that social media game advertising provides. The TV series online will be nothing more than an afterthought. I could envision a day when TV series become simply the advance PR for the games, which is where all the action and the big ad money really is.

[Temis the Vorta]

I would bet that Spurlock's show, being reality TV, is a whole lot cheaper to produce than Star Trek would be.

There are also business model for online TV that operate more on the movie theater and DVD model - people purchase the content, advertisers are not in the picture or minor - and there's nothing stopping that from developing in parallel to the traditional ad-supported models. But getting people to pay for content in a medium where FREE FREE FREE has become the standard is a high hurdle.

One way to do that is to create cheap content. YouTube is as cheap as it gets, reality TV is a bit more pricey, but vaulting to premium productions like Star Trek is another thing entirely.

Sean Aaron wrote:

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I'm willing to pay £5 for a feature film on DVD.

That's a business model that will support made-for-DVD quality, but not what we'd expect from Star Trek. Remember, those feature films wouldn't exist on DVD if there weren't people buying movie theater tickets as the main financial model. Subtract the movie theaters and you're left with Asylum quality movies.

Personally, I wouldn't pay $4/episode for anything. I get episodes on Netflix for about $1.50/DVD, and that includes three or four episodes per disk. When people become used to paying $X for something, it's very hard to get them to pay $X+ anything, especially in this shitty economy.

[Sean Aaron]

Temis the Vorta wrote:

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Personally, I wouldn't pay $4/episode for anything. I get episodes on Netflix for about $1.50/DVD, and that includes three or four episodes per disk. When people become used to paying $X for something, it's very hard to get them to pay $X+ anything, especially in this shitty economy.

I agree that given I can get a DVD box set for a tenner, paying even 99p per episode for download is a non-starter for me. But, if it was a first run show that I was invited to support out the gate via purchasing it (a download from iTunes that I would then "own" and could view repeatedly) then I might be persuaded to part with more. I will acknowledge that I might be in the minority there.

[jefferiestubes8]

What if CBS tried an animated series and had it as subscription-only (Hulu Plus, Netflix instant streaming ,
Video-on-demand ONLY on a subscription channel: Showtime) Not on the Showtime linear TV schedule.
or paid download only (iTunes, Amazon)?
Yes it would really be a first for TV but possible.
And of course a Blu-ray/DVD release 6 months after the 13-episode 1st season series run with special features.

Of course it wouldn't be live-action series but less costly to create an animated adult-audience TV-14 rated series than a live-action one.

Probably set in the JJVerse and timeline starting in 2014.

What do you guys think?

[Temis the Vorta]

If they're doing an animated series, why not put it on the Cartoon Network? It seems like a good bet they're be interested, at a price that makes sense on an animation budget. The likelihood of Cartoon Network's interest is the reason to do an animated series vs. live action. Otherwise, why do it at all?

CBS can also put it on hulu or whatever ancillary revenue streams they can think of, but those options won't fund even an animated series. The make or break is, where is it going to be placed on broadcast or cable? Any show needs that as its main revenue stream, or it's a non-starter.

[jefferiestubes8]

With the Amazon.com announcement today streaming Viacom shows just like Netflix I can see Amazon getting original scripted shows just like Netflix has a couple original shows coming in 2012.
If CBS strikes a deal with Amazon for an exclusive streaming and downloading for an new Trek series in say 3 years for USA only it's possible Outside of USA could get TV airings.

[AviTrek]

Has any of these deals been for anywhere close to the budget that a Star Trek show would need?