Putting a television series on the air is no guarantee that you'll attract a stream of steady fans (see: Enterprise). It's worth pointing out that they did pretty well from 1979-1987 just with a movie series, too.
All the while, fans continued to pester Paramount, asking when they were gonna put Star Trek back on tv. The movies were never viewed as a full victory; only when TNG premiered did we feel that we'd finally won.
Not that the studio has or had any interest at all in the fannish scorekeeping about who was "winning." Paramount just made their money. People who will pay to see the movie are fans by the only definition that matters.
"Fan" was a late 19th century abbreviation of "fanatic", as in a person who has a strong interest in or admiration for something like a sport or actor, etc. Merely being interested enough to see something doesn't make you a fan. People who pay to see movies are consumers. People who discuss it many times afterwards are fans.
It sounds like "fan" in many cases must be a politically correct euphemism for something that's diagnosable.
That's a pretty swell idea in your last post, Temis. I can safely say I've never thought of it. Now my mind's buzzin' again...
My megarants have been inspired by reading a great book that anyone involved in media should check out: Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. It describes the future of business on the internet and all media, and explains among other things why piracy is inevitable and not necessarily even a bad thing, and why statements like Jeff Zucker of NBC, that the TV industry doesn't want to trade "analog dollars for digital pennies" are completely clueless. Those digital pennies are a mountain of gold, and in any event, they're the future so everyone better figure out how to turn them into a mountain of gold or your business will be taken over by the other guy who has figured it out. It just struck me how perfectly positioned Star Trek is to take advantage of the disruptive economics that are emerging in all of entertainment - TV, internet, games etc - by being a global brand with a huge backlog of content. I can't think of any entertainment title that is in a better position. Certainly that approach wouldn't work with a new space-opera franchise, since building the global awareness would be a gargantuan and expensive task, and there would be no backlog to use to support yourself while you're doing it. It's just a shame that all the old-media companies lack vision, and CBS looks like the least-visionary of the bunch (FOX might be the most visionary, the way they're rolling the dice with Terra Nova). Maybe the really innovative ideas need to come from the advertising industry, not the TV business. The ad industry is where all the power is anyway. They hold the purse strings and the TV business is just an adjunct that serves the ad industry. And from my experience with the ad industry, there's a lot of creativity there and the culture embraces risk. Disruptive economics aren't a threat, they're an opportunity to do something new and exciting. But I'm increasingly thinking that non-interactive media like movies and TV are just going to become an adjunct of games, where the real innovation will occur. Having internet games evolve to be more TV or movie like (in both content and experience - easier, like turning on a TV show) seem like a surer thing than TV or movies becoming more gamelike. The great thing about games is that you can leverage the work of players to create content for free, the content being the attention they bring to socializing as a game element. In effect, the players are employees providing free content. Just like on TrekBBS, the members are employees who work for free, except that because of copyright, TrekBBS could never take the additional step of truly capitalizing on that content in ways that go far beyond silly banner ads that just annoy everyone. Which makes me wonder why Paramount or CBS (whoever has internet rights) hasn't made efforts to capitalize on the enormous backlog of effort that fans have put into fanfics, fan art and fanvids. The current assumption is that the Star Trek copyright holder is being "generous" in not suing everyone. Turn that around, so that the Star Trek copyright holder freely licenses the property to all comers, with the stipulation that it holds a monopoly on making money. Nobody can make money on fan content now anyway, so nobody loses anything. But Paramount or CBS could employ that content as part of the content backlog that they should be leveraging globally. Of course there would need to be some kind of quality filtering mechanism, but YouTube is doing great without much filtering, just throwing all the crap at us and letting users do the filtering. There should be a YouTube of Star Trek fan content, with the same business model as YouTube uses, funneling money into the parent company that helps fund the loss-leader TV series. The YouTube-StarTrek site should advertise that the money is being used for that, and reward everyone for helping gather up the pennies that will be used in its creation, with a big counter on the front page that tracks how much money has been made so far. Anything that can bring game mechanics into the site will help grab and keep visitors. Maybe it should be a mega-channel within YouTube, if it can accommodate more than videos, so Paramount or CBS should work with YouTube to make that happen. That would benefit both parties. It could be a new content model for TV production and a new model for YouTube to expand beyond "just" videos. Why should YouTube be content with merely one kind of media? I just went to YouTube and typed "star trek channel" into the search field to see what comes up - just a bunch of random stuff, trailers, reviews, parodies, but nothing that will grab me and say "stay here and become part of a global community." Another wasted opportunity. And if you want to see just how clueless the old media can be, look at what you get at the link that should be in use NOW for what I've described: http://www.youtube.com/startrek. Terminated for copyright infringement??? How about terminated for total corporate cluelessness - how could there be NOTHING at that link at all??? Here's a fun exercise that I just now discovered, try typing in http://www.youtube.com/[any corporate brand you can think of]. Lexus, Nike, McDonalds, Burger King, Ford, Paramount, CBS, CSI...what a fascinating and nonsensical mix of corporations that have a clue about new media vs those who still don't get it. What's the pattern? Car companies get it but fast food doesn't? Why does CBS have a channel, but http://www.youtube.com/CSI doesn't redirect to CBS's channel? I'm frankly shocked and amazed. I've just naively assumed all corporations, big and small, knew what they needed to do by now. YouTube is ad based. I'm fairly certain a call from a major corporate brand (or even a minor one) would be returned rather quickly. Okay I'll shut up now, maybe I should try turning these ideas into something in the real world instead of yakking insanely about them. This has been a very educational process.
A worthwhile distinction, if Paramount or CBS had the vision to actually turn fans into an economic asset above and beyond mere consumers. And they could, which I've ranted about rather extensively in this thread. But they aren't doing it now. In their defense, it seems they are far from alone in their cluelessness. Maybe they should study what the auto makers are doing, seems like that industry may be well ahead of them.
No, no, this is a genuinely fascinating educational process for me as well. Frankly I'm in shock that the Trek link and mostly the rest of my attempts aren't working. I always assumed the same thing. I figured the only reason I hadn't had it confirmed was that I'm not on YouTube often, personally. But the fact that so many millions of people are and yet they're allowing this to slip through fingertips is... hilarious. And you raise a good point on NBC's foolishness. I'm not sure I read Zucker's 'analog dollars and digital pennies' statement before but if I did I've forgotten about it and doubtless shook my head then just as I have now. I can speak from plenty of personal experience when I say that games are evolving at blinding speeds compared with television and films. Not just internet games, of course, but for the sake of the discussion we'll fixate on that and certainly the players are creating content as well as context. Curious parties will see so much of what the player base has built, just as any giant fansite such as TrekBBS, Trekweb, GateWorld, you name it is going to attract attention as well. In that sense forumites effectively create content and context too. "This is a fun thing! Let me show you my fanart. My fanfiction. Or let me show you the depths of my chosen interest by discussing it passionately. Look at all this free advertising."
It's not advertising if all the fan junk is presented ONLY to the fan community (who don't need to be convinced to watch).
Envision a YouTube of Star Trek fan stuff (not just videos - YouTube doesn't need to only be videos, and I predict they will evolve beyond that if they're not doing that already). Like fan products, YouTube is also just "a bunch of junk." If you wanted to build an ad-based site that can make a profit because it attracts millions of viewers (YouTube's business model), you can pay people to sit there and sift through the junk - which would be too pricey - or you can just let people do it for no pay, by giving them mechanisms like like/dislike, commenting, allowing them to spread links around (the ONLY way I've ever viewed anything on YouTube, other than when it's work-related, is because someone linked to something hilarious and either emailed it to me or posted it in BBSes like this one.) The vital ingredients are: lots and lots of people (so that even the paltry money you make per eyeball off online advertising can pay off through sheer volume; or you can do it like social media games and make $$ selling virtual goods to 5% of players, with everyone else getting a free ride) and incentivizing those people to work for you for free (suckers that we are). Every person who posts a link or helps sort the chaos by clicking "like" is working for YouTube. Maybe they're giving YouTube a penny of their free labor each time they do that. Multiplied by millions, that's a lot of free labor. So YouTube makes money both ways - direct and indirect - and it's all based on micropayments. A direct penny for an ad view, an indirect penny from donated labor. Pretty soon you have a real business. TrekBBS could do the same thing, except there's no payoff to putting effort into this site when Paramount/CBS owns the brand name and success would just mean they move in and take over. But in theory, if TrekBBS were like YouTube, with the TrekBBS brand worth investing in, all it would need is a greater marketing effort to get the membership numbers way up to a place where even the micropayments of online ads and posting content (like what I'm doing right now) would be a serious business. It could be done through things like, giving people premium accounts for bringing in X new signed-up members. Doesn't have to cost money, or much money. There are only 3000 active members. Why isn't that 3 million?
I think this video sent to syndicated stations shortly before TNG premiered make it clear that putting "Star Trek" back on TV had more to do with having a viable product than any fan pestering. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgZSdzOJYOY&feature=feedlik
A lot of that presentation consists of what fans had been pointing out all along, that demand for a weekly series was there and Star Trek is a "self-generating publicity machine". I don't think all that much has changed in that respect in the intervening twenty-five years.
Let me put it this way: If the fans hadn't been harassing Paramount on a constant basis, we wouldn't have even gotten TAS, never mind the movies and the spinoff series. They would've concluded that nobody cared about the property, it would've run its course in syndication and we'd lucky to get repeats on Nick At Nite. So stick that in your Funk & Wagnalls.
The movie is an example of a fate worse than death - youthenasia. There is gonna be in Star Trek in 2151 - TOS - in theaters near you.