So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies?

Earlier this week, Next Generation published a short excerpt from my much longer discussion of Star Wars Gallaxies and user-generated content in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The publication seems to have prompted game designer and theorist Raph Koster to blog about what he learned by adopting a more collaborationist approach to his fans. Here's some of what he had to say:

Some have since decided that it was listening to the players too much that caused some of the design problems with SWG. I am not sure I agree. If anything, I think that many subsequent problems came from not listening enough, or not asking questions in advance of changes. Walking a mile in the players' shoes is a difficult trick to pull off even if you have the best of intentions.

The tensest and most difficult moments in SWG's development -- and they came often -- were when we had to remove something that players really liked. Usually, it was against our own wishes, because of time constraints or (rarely) orders from on high. But we couldn't tell the players the real reasons sometimes. That sucked, frankly, because the open relationship really did matter. As often as we could, we laid everything bare.

These days, it's accepted wisdom that you don't reveal a feature until it's done, so as to guarantee that you never let the players down. Of course, even finished features sometimes fall out for one reason or another...

In any case, I think I don't agree with that philosophy. I'd rather have prospective players on a journey with the team, than have them be a passive group marketed to. Yes, they will suffer the ups and downs, and see the making of the sausage... but these days, that's getting to be an accepted thing in creative fields. There's not much to gain, to my mind, in having the creators sitting off on a pedestal somewhere -- people fall from pedestals, and pedestals certainly will not survive contact with Live operation of a virtual world. Instead, I'd rather the customers know the creators as people who make mistakes, so that when one happens, they are more likely to be forgiven or understood.

One of the challenges of academic publishing is that the world can move out from under year in that long, long period of time between when you finish a book and when it hits the shelves. In the case of Convergence Culture, one of the biggest shifts was the meltdown which has occured in the relations between the players and creators of Star Wars Galaxies, much of which really hit the fan last December. I still think what the book says about Star Wars Galaxies -- Raph Koster, as the comments above suggest, remains a leading advocate for a more collaborationist relationship between producers and consumers; his approach does contrast with at least some of the policies that Lucas has applied elsewhere in dealing with other aspects of Star Wars fandom and so Star Wars represents a rich case study of the uncertain and unstable relations between media franchises and their consumers. If anything, these contrasts are even easier to see when we see how shifts in company leadership impacted the community around this particular game.

I have not been on the inside of that meltdown. Most of what I know came from a close reading of news reports about what happened and conversations with other games researchers, such as USC's Doug Thomas or UW's Kurt Squire. I am sure there are readers who could tell us more about what happened than I can and I would welcome them to share their experiences here. I prepared some reflections about what happened for our Convergence Culture Consortium partners newsletter last January.

THE COLLAPSE OF AN EMPIRE: STAR WARS GALAXIES SHOWS US RIGHT AND WRONG WAYS TO COURT FANS

Shortly after Christmas, a friend and fellow researcher Doug Thomas sent me a link to a fascinating and moving fan-made video by Javier -- marking his decision to leave the massively multiplayer game world, Star Wars Galaxies, and commenting on the mass migration of hard core fans and players from this space.

Some background is needed to be able to appreciate this video and what it might suggest about the nature of fan investments in MMPORGS. In keeping with the cantina sequences which have been a favorite aspect of the Star Wars film series, the game provides opportunities for players to select the entertainer class as a possible role within its world. Javier helped to organize the Entertainer class players to create an extraordinary series of Cantina Musicals -- elaborate Busby Berkeley style musical numbers which required the participation and cooperation of a cast of hundreds of players.

As you watch the video, keep in mind that each character is controlled by an individual player, hitting buttons in a choreographed manner,who may be separated from the other participants by thousands of miles

of real world geography. The potential for such videos is built into the game -- through the capacity to move characters in certain ways,for players to share common spaces and experiences, and for players to

record their own game play activities -- but no one in the game company imagined that the fans would have used them to create Lawrence Welk-inflected Christmas specials or to protest company policies. In

short, the video expresses the power of the fan community both in terms of how it was made and in terms of what it has to say about the experience of playing the game....

Raph Koster saw the Star Wars fans as co-designers in the development of the game: actively courting them from the project's conception, sharing design docs and getting their feedback at every step of the way, designing a game which was highly dependent on fan creativity to provide much of its content and fan performance to create mutually rewarding experiences within the game.

Here are some of the things Koster did right in courting Star Wars fans:

1. He respected their expertise and emotional investments in the series.

2. He opened a channel of communications with fans early in the process.

3. He actively solicited advice from fans about design decisions and followed that advice where-ever possible.

4. He created resources which sustained multiple sets of interests in the series.

5. He designed forms of game play which allowed fans to play diverse roles which were mutually reinforcing.

Here's some of what he had to say about the importance of fans to the franchise's success:

"There's no denying it - the fans know Star Wars better than the developers do. They live and breathe it. They know it in an intimate way. On the other hand, with something as large and broad as the Star Wars universe, there's ample scope for divergent opinions about things. These are the things that lead to religious wars among fans and all of a sudden you have to take a side because you are going to be etablishing how it works in this game."

That said, the policies Koster created were eroded over time, leading to increased player frustration and distrust. In another video, Javier traces a history of grievances and conflicts between the "Powers That Be" within the game company and the Entertainer class of characters. Some casual players felt the game was too dependent on player-generated content, while the more creative players felt that upgrades actually restricted their ability to express themselves through the game and marginalized the Entertainer class from the overall experience. At the same time, the game failed to meet the company's own revenue expectations, especially in the face of competition from the enormously successful World of Warcraft, a game which adopted a very different design philosophy.

Late last year, the company announced plans to radically revamp the game's rules and content, a decision that has led to the wholesale alienation of the existing player base and massive defections. It remains to be seen if the plans will draw in new consumers; it is clear that they have significantly destroyed the existing fan culture. Javier is not alone in seeing these decisions as the end of the road for his community.

The statements made by Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director, at LucasArts to the New York Times illustrates the huge shift in thinking from Koster's original philosophy to this "retooled" franchise:

We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base. There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves.

MacIntyre's comments represent a classic set of mistakes in thinking about how to build a fan community around a property:

1. Don't confuse "accessibility" with simplicity. As Steve Johnson notes in his best-selling book, Everything Bad is Good For You or educator James Paul Gee argues in his new book, Video Games Are Good For the Soul, contemporary media audiences are searching for complexity, not simplicity. The video games that succeed in the market are the ones that demand the most of their players -- not those that require the least. The key to successful games is not dumb content, but complexity that is organized and managed so that users can handle it.

2. Don't underestimate the intelligence of your consumers. Gamers are not illiterate. They are not necessarily simply kids. Industry statistics suggest that the average gamer is in his/her late 20s or early 30s and all signs are that the game market is expanding as the initial generation of gamers ages. Star Wars Galaxies consumers skewed older and as such, they wanted something different from the game play experience than younger Star Wars fans. And if you do think your consumers are idiots, it is not bright to say so to New York Times reporters. The fans do read newspapers and as members of a collective intelligence community, they have an enormous network for circulating information that matters to the group. These comments have come back to haunt the corporate executives many times over and probably did as much as anything else in creating a mass exodus from the game.

3. In an age of transmedia storytelling, don't assume fans want the same experience from every installment of the same franchise. There are many films, books, comics, and games out there which focus on the experience of the central protagonists of the series. Koster wisely recognized that while individual players might want to BE Luke Skywalker or Hans Solo, a world where everyone was a Jedi would be boring for all involved. Instead, he created a game world where there were many different classes of players (including the Entertainer class) and where each of those roles interacted in a complicated ecology of experience.

4. Don't underestimate the diversity of fan cultures. Contrary to what is often claimed, successful media properties do not appeal to the lowest common denominator. Rather, they draw together a coalition of micro-publics, each with their own interests in the material, each expressing their emotional bonds with the content in their own ways. Accordingly, Star Wars has a large, diverse audience interested in everything from the flora and fauna to interrelationships among characters. Given such diversity, why would you assume that the core market only wants to blow things up? The real sweet spot would be to /tap into/ these diverse audiences and sell even more copies. Why, given the richness of fan creative expression around Star Wars, would you assume that Luke Skywalker is the only role people care about? The goal should have been to expand the range of experiences available in the game rather than dismantle what appealed to one audience in hopes of attracting another.

5. Don't underestimate the value of fan creative contributions to the success of contemporary media franchises. Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, the most successful game franchise of all time, has suggested that his success can be traced directly back to player contributions:

We see such benefit from interacting with our fans. They are not just people who buy our stuff. In a very real sense, they are people who helped to create our stuff...We are competing with other properties for these creative individuals. All of these different games are competing for communities, which in the long run are what will drive our sales.... Whichever game attracts the best community will enjoy the most success. What you can do to make the game more successful is not to make the game better but to make the community better.

Conversely, when you alienate your most active and creative fans -- folks like Javier -- then you severely damage the franchise as a whole. These people play valuable roles as grassroots intermediaries helping to build up interest in your property and as performers helping to shape the experience of other players.

6. Don't Sacrifice your existing fan base in search of a totally different market. The kind of robust and creative fan cultures Wright and Koster describe in their comments above are hard to build and even harder to rebuild. To some degree, fans have to find media properties which meets their needs, even though companies can adopt policies of fan relations which will make them more receptive to fans and can help to sustain such communities once they emerge. Koster worked hard to win over Star War fans who were skeptical about his efforts given the history of fairly simplistic action-oriented solo-player titles within the Star Wars franchises. Koster, himself, was fully aware that you could not institute large scale changes in such a game world without damaging the kind of trust he had helped to establish. Here's what he told me when I interviewed him for my book: "Just like it is not a good idea for a government to make radical legal changes without a period of public comment, it is often not wise for an operator of an online world to do the same."

I have just scratched the surface here. I suspect the rise and fall of Star Wars Galaxies will be studied for years to come as a textbook example of good and bad ways to deal with fan communities. Certainly our member companies should draw on it as a reference in framing and evaluating their own fan relations policies.

Field Notes from Project Good Luck: CMS in China

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, CMS is experimenting with new ways of opening up our research to the public. This week, a team of CMS graduate students and faculty are traveling to three cities in China -- Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen -- to learn more about how people are incorporating mobile technologies and social networking technologies into their everyday lives. They have created a website through which they are sharing their observations and continuing their dialogue with the people they meet in China. They are conducting this trip in collaboration with GSD&M Advertising as part of the work we are doing for our Convergence Culture Consortium partners. I thought I would share with my readers some of their initial observations based on their first few days of visiting in Shaghai. Here's part of some field notes filed by CMS graduate student Geoffrey Long:

We walked across town down to a shopping district, where we entered into a massive department store. We walked through the men's floor, up across the women's floor, and then to the cell phone floor.

Yes, the cell phone floor.

Were I a millionaire, I would go back to the States, go into my local Sprint store, cackle at their meager offerings and then grab the guy at the counter by the ear like some 18th-century school marm. I would haul him out of the mall, onto the T, down to the airport and straight back here, still dragging him along by his ear, right back to this floor of this store, where I would finally let him go. I would dump him unceremoniously on the floor and yell, "See? SEE? THIS is how it should be done!"

In the States, any given cell phone store only carries a paltry few models of phones. This is because so much of the market back home is totally segmented - the carriers try and convince people to switch by only offering particular models. As a consumer, this bites because it absolutely shatters the amount of choices we have, especially when every time we buy a phone we're basically committing ourselves to a new contract. Ugh. Here, though, you buy a phone and then you insert a SIM chip into it, which contains all of your user information. No matter which phone you buy, most of them will take any SIM chip. This means you can choose from any phone currently being manufactured, and allows for much, much greater choice - including opening up the market to a bunch of cell phone makers that you've never heard of. When you walk into this floor of the department store, you are faced with booths from the different manufacturers. Each one of these booths, from Nokia or Motorola or Sony-Ericsson or Anycall or a dozen others, offers more selection than any cell phone store back home. The phones aren't cheap, but many of the offerings offer seriously tantalizing options.

I'll admit I was a little disappointed by the lack of anything truly revolutionary - they didn't have the Nokia videocam-phone that I'd been eyeballing for a while, but they did have several others offering similar functionality. Videoblogging services are going to explode when people can create their own little moblog entries from anywhere, recorded at DV-level quality and then uploaded wirelessly to the web, which their friends can then download from anywhere. Imagine an RSS feed on your phone where you're sent a text message anytime a friend uploads a new videoblog entry from their phone, and with a click or two you can download that entry straight to your own phone to watch wherever. This is where mobile media is headed, and it seems like several manufacturers are leading the charge. Nokia is right out front - as they are with the design market as well. Motorola has a couple of contenders flitting about the ring as well, but Nokia's L'Amour Collection is a set of leather-trimmed phones with laser-etched (I think) floral patterns right in the metal. On the store floor these models were being displayed on pedastals with items like a Victorian mirror, a mock Tiffany lamp, and a little Asian treasure box, and they fit right in. These phones may be designed for women, but I want one - it's refreshing to see a phone design take a new direction than simply painting the sucker pink. As the RAZR proved for Motorola, the market is teeming with demand for great phone design - according to a BusinessWeek article, Motorola sold more RAZR phones last year than Apple sold iPods. Whether or not American cell dealers are being boneheaded and stingy or not, with markets like China opening up the worldwide mobile media landscape is going to become extremely interesting, extremely fast.

And here's how Beth Coleman, the faculty member who is supervising the trip, describes her experience at that same phone store:

So we are at the counter and I am asked to select the phone number that will go with said phone. There are at least three categories of price ranging from 100 RMB to 300 RMB. I ask, "What's the difference within the numbers offered," assuming that access, long distance, something about mobile IT would figure in here. No. the difference is that some numbers, those containing more 8s and 6s, are more auspicious than other, particularly those containing 4s. No kidding. The variable on price of the phone number was determined by some ratio between appearance of lucky numbers and the memorability of the number itself. And it was common enough for people to pay a premium for this god luck charm that it was built into the regular service. I myself went for a modest amount of good luck, opting for the 120 RMB number with three 8s and two 6s over the bare bones luck.

Liwen, who had translated the transaction for me and noted my look of incredulity when it came to the price variance on lucky numbers, had this to say. "Yes, it is true. It's very old this tradition and it comes from Cantonese where the pronunciation of 8 is "fah," which means "a lot of moneys" and the sound of 4 means "die." It is a bad number. Six sounds like successful. Who pays attention to this? Modern young women like herself? No, no really, but people with money do. Also, she let me know astrology is currently all the rage in Hong Kong with the under thirty set.

We hope you will want to follow along their further adventures over at the Project Good Luck website and in the process, learn more about the technological and economic transformations that are reshaping modern China.

Mind Dump onThe Future of Television

Our conversations about Firefly and the Long Tail suggest that there is a good deal of public interest out there in the idea of viewer-supported television. I am convinced this is an idea whose time has come. It may not happen with Firefly, The West Wing, Global Frequency or Arrested Development, but it will happen for some show sooner or later. I for one want a ringside seat to see how the experiment plays itself out. Almost every day brings news that suggests small steps closer to this goal. Nobody's Watching? Guess Again

CMS graduate student Sam Ford reports at the c3 blog about a pilot for a show called Nobody's Watching which got rejected by NBC and the WB Network but is now being distributed via You-Tube. So far, the show has received several hundred thousand downloads from people curious to see a new series from Bill Lawrence, creator of Scrubs and Spin City, which is essentially a sitcom about the networks producing a reality television series about two guys trying to create a sitcom. Lawrence saw the series as a commentary on the current state of network television; network executives worried that it was too meta -- that is, it was too complex a concept to easily communicate to viewers. (It's also likely that with two other television network themed shows starting this fall -- Tina Fey's 30 Rock and Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip -- they were afraid they might oversaturate the market on this untested genre). In the old days, that would have been the end of the story but the You-Tube distribution has started to shift the network's perceptions of the pilot.

Ford writes:

Now, with its grassroots support, Lawrence claimed that it was being revisited by NBC and that he had had calls from both ABC and Comedy Central. And one has to wonder if the CW Network, after WB passed on the show, might now be interested in having a show with such a grassroots following built into its debut.

However, Lawrence sums up the reason why this experiment is successful and why the networks are stupid not to release their pilots more often when trying to decide how to formulate a future lineup. According to reporter Bill Carter in Monday's New York Times story, Lawrence "said he believed this was exactly the kind of development that television needed to break all kinds of hidebound traditions, including presumptions about what people will and won't watch as comedy, and decisions that are made based on small organized focus groups."

If the masses are willing to participate as a test audience, why not launch a legion of pilots on YouTube or allow people to BitTorrent them. Not only do you end up with shows developing strong grassroots potential before they ever hit the air, but you get a wider response to the show in a situation where viral marketing and word-of-mouth give the feedback as to which shows will generate the most popularity based on number of downloads. Of course, the only shows that would be hurt with a system like this one are shows that are low in viewer interest, that are not appealing...but those are the shows that would hit the air and get cancelled soon, anyway. And, for more complicated concepts like the one in Nobody's Watching, releasing the show on YouTube ahead of time allows fans to become educated on the concept and prepared for the premise before the show is ever broadcast.

By the way, readers of this blog who are interested in learning more about current trends in the media industry should check out Sam's posts at the C3 blog. This past week has seen posts about Survivor, Paul Simon, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the plight of weekly papers, and the successful web-based series Soup of the Day.

Tivo and Transformation

A reader sent me a link to this interesting article about the networks push to try to disable the fast forward button on our Tivos and other digital recording devices. Nick argues, however, that this is not the primary reason why networks should be worried about digital video recording devices:

Newer TiVo boxes can connect directly to the internet. Since they are internet enabled, they can download internet content. Combine that with the hard-drive and on-demand abilities, and Tivo is now a television network. Maybe even the television network.

Another way to describe a TiVo is "a box that saves your favorite content, whenever it is played, and allows you to watch it anytime you want." This is the way many people watch TV. The network is irrelevant. With some marketing savvy, any show could bypass the network gatekeepers and go direct to TiVo. RocketBoom did - and the resulting talent fallout shows a glimpse of what happens when the network is no longer relevant. The balance of power shifts to the talent, or at least equalizes it. Not only will networks lose viewers, they will have to compete on lower margins for high-quality content.

So, starting from a very different perspective (focusing on hardware rather than on cultural practices), this writer ends up more or less at the same place Sam Ford does: a world where viewers get to sample a broader range of different television content than would currently make its way onto network television; where some shows might remain "long tail" content which needs to be supported by committed but concentrated niches of viewers; where others would build up large enough grassroots followings to start to interest a network programmer. Right now, we are starting to see brands go to the network to pitch content which they think would be a good vehicle for their products -- that's more or less what happened with Coca Cola and American Idol. We might also see producers test market shows via YouTube and try to figure out which network is most interested in serving their fan followings.

Globalizing Television

Let's toss one more variable into the mix: imagine you are an international media producer who has content you think would have some strong appeal in the United States -- a producer of a successful Japanese anime program which has not yet been picked up by the Cartoon Network, the producer of a Latin American Telenovela which wasn't selected by one of the Spanish Language channels, the developer of a cult comedy from Australia that hasn't a clear point of distribution in this market. You've already covered your core costs of production in your own national market; you've picked up some syndication purchases from neighboring countries. Why not sell that content directly to your consumers here? There's a whole world of media producers out there right now. American companies have been largely successful in blocking most of them from having access to the U.S. market. But this is starting to change and the development of new infrastructures to support the distribution and monetizing of contents will simply accelerate the rate of change.

Of course, the interesting question is whether we will still be calling this stuff "television" content given that it neither uses television as a technology for distribution and consumption of this content (or at least doesn't necessarily do so in a world where there are video iPods and computer screens and...) nor does it use the broadcast networks as the primary system of producing, filtering, or distributing content. Yet, the dramatic and genre structures of television -- short units, serialization, recurring characters, etc. -- are likely to remain in place for sometime to come. Most of us, push come to shove, like watching television even if we don't necessarily fill that the current networks offer us the broadest possible range of options.

More on Firefly and the Long Tail

With apologies to Steven Colbart, let's take this out of the realm of faith-based reasoning and resort to facts. Reader Reinier Zwitserloot estimates:

There are about 50,000 or so fans, and I'm being generous. Let's be very amicable and say each ep sells 150,000 times. That's 300,000 income.

I was skeptical that this estimate was accurate or gave a full picture of what we know about the Firefly audience, so I e-mailed a friend in the television industry to see whether he had access to more reliable numbers. So here's what he had on the dvd sales:

The Hollywood Reporter reported last July ("Wheedon flock ready for 'Firefly'

resurrection" by Anne Thompson, 22 July) that the DVD set of all 13 episodes had sold more than 200,000 copies. There is an unconfirmed number posted at WHEDONesque.com ("Firefly listed in top 1 DVD sets on FOX.com," thread started by Chris Bridges, 31 March 2006) from someone named "The Hey" that put the sales at 2.5 million on 1 April 2006 -- but that seems really high. I'd guess it's somewhere in the middle, with an uptick last summer/early fall ignited by SERENTITY's release.

So let's assume that the 2.5 million number is over the top (unless someone can show otherwise) but we can see that there were at least 200,000 copies of the DVD set sold prior to the films release.

Let's Do the Math

If we assume 200,000 purchasers as the bare minimum, then the episodes would have to go for $5 to recoup Reiner's estimated budget per episode, which seems steep for impulse purchases, but perhaps not that far off what you ended up paying per episode if you bought the boxed set for roughly $60.

That said, this is probably the most conservative possible reading of the numbers. Keep a few things in mind: these are the number of the copies of the entire set sold at a bulk price. We do not know what percentage of people rented those dvds from Netflix or a similar service. We don't know how many would have paid a smaller price to sample just one episode. We don't know what the impact of the film's release was on the sales or rentals of the dvds (we can bet that it did draw a number of people to the dvds who had not seen the episodes when they were aired. I'd bet most of us know people who followed that route). All of this could boast the numbers over the 200,000 number cited above and start to make what I am proposing look more like a winning proposition.

Now as we turn to statistics about the television audience, the potential market looks even larger. Here's what Nielsen says:

On average, across 11 weeks that the show aired on FOX, there were 2.7 million people 18-49 and 3.1 million heads of households that tuned in.

Of course, these folks were watching for free and we don't know how many of them would pay to access the episodes. These numbers are low in terms of ratings for a broadcast show -- but if you could turn them into paying customers, they would be very strong numbers for direct to dvd or download sales. A big IF, I know.

Now, Compare the Feature Film

Here's what we know about the feature film:

Budget for Serenity was $40 million (not including marketing costs). Domestic box office totaled $25.5 million after a $10 million opening weekend (30 September 2005). Foreign take was an additional $13.3 million.

We learn two things from this:

1) if we are right at estimating a per episode cost of 1 million, then the producers could have made 40 episodes, in theory, for what was spent on the feature film.

2) while these numbers are considered poor return on a feature film, getting that many people to spend a good deal less money to download an episode would be considered a major success.

In the course of researching this, I stumbled onto another author, Adam Sternbergh, at New York magazine, who has made a similar case for why Firefly might be a good candidate for direct to consumer production:

Let's say that Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, wanted to bring the series back to air. (Though "back to air" is a TV phrase now as anachronistically quaint as "switching the dial.") Let's say he found a million Firefly fans online--and, trust me, they're not hiding--who were willing to pay, say, $39.99 each for a sixteen-episode season of Firefly. (Not an unreasonable price, given how many people pay about that amount for full seasons on DVD.) Suddenly, Joss Whedon's got roughly $40 million to play with--and he doesn't need a network. Or a time slot. Or advertisers. He can beam the damn shows right to your computer if he wants to.

None of this makes the production of a direct to dvd season of Firefly a sure thing but at this rate, you could have made a number of television episodes for the budget of the feature film.

Predictible Returns: What Disney Teaches Us

I introduced the idea of an advanced subscription from fans because this would allow the production company to move forward with confidence that there was at least a minimal market for what they were making. Keep in mind most media production decisions don't have anywhere near that level of guarantee of market success. They bet on their best guesses of what the audience is going to be.

That's why the Disney analogy is interesting. Disney doesn't have to sell subscriptions for its direct to the consumer sequels to The Lion King or The Jungle Book. These videos have a reliable consumer base which regularly pushes them into the top dvd sales or rentals upon release and keeps them there, more or less, until the new titles hit the market. These are in effect presold. They may not make as much money per pop as a theatrical release - but then they also don't cost anywhere near as much money. They are, however, far less hit or miss than the theatrical films which depend on generating interest around new and untested properties (and Disney's track record there has been pretty grim).

Pay Check to Pay Check

Liza raises a question about whether a show with Firefly's ensemble cast might work under this model. She writes:

I think the pre-pay, direct-to-DVD/ipod idea has merit, but could not be applied to the task of assembling nearly a dozen actors (rebuilding all the sets!) and ask them to work, essentially, paycheck to paycheck.

My first response was to ask whether Liza has any sense how many television actors right now are living paycheck to paycheck. By this logic, television shows would never get produced at all. Many recurring character actors - anyone who is not a series regular - probably gets hired on a check by check basis and is grateful for the relative stability a gig on a television series represents. While it is true that a long-standing series offers a decent degree of security for a performer, the reality is that any television show can be canceled on the whim of a top network executive. It's not like tv actors get tenure. That said, she is probably right that it might be hard to hold together an ensemble as large as Firefly had.

I would argue that from the point of view of the production company, my direct to consumer television idea might make more sense (especially when you add my ideas about selling subscriptions in advance to the most hardcore fans): the production company can make a reasonable decision about how many episodes it wants to produce based on iestimates of its likely audience and return on investment. Under the current system, the production company is essentially producing on spec and really only returns its costs once it goes into syndication or DVD packaging. Under this model, the production company starts to get returns from the moment the first product ships.

Is it a risk to go this way? No doubt - all the more so because no other television show has ever done this before. I suspect this option was never considered when Whedon was thinking about the fate of the series. Clearly, the decision would have rested with the studios involved -- not with Whedon. (Sorry to have personalized this discussion around Whedon in my first post. I didn't mean for this to come across as an attack on the guy.) I am sure Whedon wasn't offered any options forward other than the movie and I am certain under those circumstances, he was better off going with the movie. What I am suggesting here is a way to rewrite the rules of American television. It hasn't happened yet. It may happen some day.

What The Video iPod Adds

Catana notes, speaking about video iPod, that:

We forget how quickly new technologies change things that didn't seem feasible a very short time before. It was just a bit too early for any choice but Serenity. Alas.

He's certainly right that using the iPod as the distribution channel wasn't even a hypothetical option at the point Serenity was made but direct to dvd would in theory have been a model. Video iPod adds two factors to the mix: a stable infrastructure which allows per episode sales to consumers (my assumption is that hardcore fans would buy dvds and that this system will appeal most to casual consumers who want to taste the series) and a global distribution channel which allows you to quickly enter a world-wide market without carrying some of the costs of physically shipping your product. Both are significant advantages but direct to dvd production was possible when the decision was made to go with the feature film.

The Bottom Line

In some ways, Firefly would have been the best test case for this model - because of Whedon's reputation and hardcore fan base. In other ways, it would have been a bad test case for reasons readers have identified - the costs of an ensemble cast and of the special effects budget required for this particular series.

Would it have worked? We will never know.