Fans Attempting to Pay for Enterprise

An anonymous reader writes "What started of as a suggestion to pay for season 5 of Enterprise has actully snowballed into a project that no one has ever attempted before, that of getting fans to pay for the production costs of a tv series. It has brought on board a raft of people including lawyers. I wonder if the quoted $50 to $80 million is reachable." I gotta say that Enterprise has been better this season, but I feel like it's still only mediocre. Battlestar Galactica might be the best SciFi airing right now. And I woulda chipped in for more Firefly in a heartbeat.

Re:Slashdot spelling check ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

According to one recent source, Slashdot editors are paid approximately $28K. I suppose OSTG gets what it pays for. You'll note NewsForge stories tend to have far more professionalism, for example.

RE: FARSCAPE

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the farscapers tried something like this, they didn't get enough for an entire episode but they did get alot of money for donations to military librarys, and ads, and other stuff...

www.savefarscape.com

Star Trek: New Voyages

[Mage66]

The fan-produced series, based on the Original Series did INCREDIBLY well.

The money was donated to the Space Shuttle Children's Fund.

I don't remember how much was raised, but there were millions of downloads of the shows.

http://www.newvoyages.com

Costumes and sets and whatnot are already available. If Paramount were to continue Enterprise as Pay-per-view, or do a few direct to DVD movies each year, I think that would work well..

A Direct-to-DVD movie or Mini-Series about the Romulan War would sell well to fans.

Re:Misapproriated Funds

[Buran]

Yes, people have certainly done this -- the X-Prize, while some of the funds came from major companies, was partly funded by individuals. Yes, some of that was rich people who could donate a lot of money, but that does mean that there are people out there who will fund making it possible for ordinary citizens to visit space.

Furthermore, some of the individual X-Prize teams operated off money gained from ordinary commercial ventures. An example of this is Armadillo Aerospace of Texas, which used funds gained from sale of PC-based games to fund its program. A good portion of the people here probably donated to that effort by purchasing the software built in part by one of the lead techs of AA; millions more members of the general public did the same.

I would guess that a large percentage of those people probably did not know that they were helping to fund a private space program (which has yet to launch anything more than test vehicles, but which hasn't given up yet even though the prize has been won) and much of the cash was earned before the X-Prize became a reality.

But I, personally, can say that I stepped up to the cash register, box in hand, knowing that some minor percentage of the money I paid for what I took home would be used to put ordinary civilians in space.

And I'm damn proud of that.

Bullshit

[Andy Dodd]

Ever heard of BitTorrent?

I've seen some describe this as a potential future for TV where the content providers are smart enough to embrace new technologies. Instead of BT being used to pirate episodes, fans pay a modest fee to subscribe to the tracker that provides their favorite episodes.

The fee covers production costs, the fans themselves do the distribution.

Re:It only takes a penny each....

[Anonymous Coward]

$1 million / 1 penny = 100 million pennies. According to Snopes [snopes.com], he got the equivalent of 2.3 million pennies, aka $23,000, after a month and eventually reached his goal of $28,000. Not exactly millions.

Complaining about charity?

[nmarchan]

From the unofficial project FAQ at TrekBBS: "Why donate for a TV show and not for social aid? It's not an either/or option. Of course the most noble donations are those for humane causes, and I'm sure many of us here are supporting aid organizations and their work. But independent from that each day people spend alot of money on entertainment products, cinema, superficial things. To use just a little of this money (what equals to one cheap DVD or CD) to keep the show you like on the air, isn't a bad cause then either, is it?" It's not any more "selfish" than buying that season set of DVDs from that show you like.

Re:BitTorrent - Enterprise's downfall

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you are contributing to the ratings measurements it does not matter how you watch it.

There are only about 6,000 homes with monitoring units that track for nationwide ratings, about 20,000 that track for local ratings, and about 2 million people get sent TV surveys and diaries. In the first two cases, if you live in one of the 26,000 places with a monitoring device, by all means you should use the TV and not bittorrent. If you are in the latter 2 million, you should make sure to write down what shows you downloaded. Otherwise, you don't matter a lick.

To Quote Kirk Again . . .

[cashman73]

Enterprise was a good show and all, but seriously, maybe it's time had come.

After all, "It's just a TV show!"

The way some of these people on saveenterprise.com are talking, you'd think it was the second coming of Christ!

As Dr. Bones McCoy has already said (over and over in his grave):

"It's Dead, Jim!"

Let's just let Star Trek die and rest in peace,... And then bury Berman and Braga alive with all the damn tapes of the freakin' Nazis in Space! :-)

Re: FARSCAPE

[robobor]

There's some weird law that limits the number of financial contributors. It would work if everybody gave money to a single entity created for money collection, and then that entity invested the money in the series. We went through all of this in fall '01 after Farscape was dropped.

What about an indiependent show

[Datasage]

If your dealing with star trek, your dealing with copyrights up the ass. So if you manage to raise $50 million to create a show, why not pay a production studio to produce the show indiependently and distribute the film on bittorrent or DVD?

Im talking about a completly orginal show. Not one you would have to waste money on licencing rights for.

Re:Let's see... about 6 weeks ago?

[spuzzzzzzz]

The US offered $15 million (and Bush didn't even pretend to care), a UN official, rightly IMHO, called the US on it. The US promptly upped it to 30 million trying for damage control

In fact, it was my understanding that the $30 million was intended as a loan, not a gift.

I am not normally one for nationalist sentiment, but Australia, a country of 20 million people and a GDP of less than 1/15th that of the U.S, donated $1 billion Australian dollars to tsunami relief in Indonesia. Thats about $US770 million, or more than twice the U.S. government's donation. Maybe that should help explain why many people were less than thrilled with GWB's response.