Battlestar Galactica 'Webisodes' Conflict Brewing

nebaz writes "MSNBC has an article saying that there is tension between NBC and Ron Moore and team about the royalties on the 'Webisodes' of Battlestar Galactica. The episodes have been seized by NBC, balking at Ron Moore's refusal to produce any more episodes, due to compensation issues."

Re:You're kidding right?

[tomhudson]

The article is talking about "webisodes" - 3-minute promotional mini-episodes you can get off the net - not BSG itself.

I'm waiting for the DVD, like the last 2-1/2 seasons. Much more fun to watch it all in a couple of sittings.

Re:You're kidding right?

[denebian devil]

FTA: "NBC Universal, the studio behind "Battlestar," refused to pay residuals or credit the writers of these "Webisodes," claiming they're promotional materials. So "Battlestar" executive producer Ron Moore said he wouldn't deliver any more of them, including the 10 that were already in the can."

10 refers to the Webisodes, not to the episodes of Season 3 running on SciFi itself.

To clarify

[TheGreatHegemon]

This is NOT the actual BSG series! Sci-Fi will keep screening all of BSG. These referred to the webisodes that were online just before Season 3 was released, and narrated the formation of the the resistance.

Uh....

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an industry-wide battle between creatives and network/studio execs that goes way beyond this one show. Most of the unions [wga.org] completely messed up years ago negotiating residuals for the home markets (VHS and DVDs especially), so there's a LOT of resistence to giving away the farm this time. (Many writers, for example, in movie animation get zero [latimes.com] residuals.) Unfortunately, there's a lot of momentum and precedents that resulted from the previous mistakes, so it's kind of an uphill battle for the writers, directors, actors guilds. The future gets even more complicated when writers, actors, and other artists work directly for the Internet, for phones, for games, etc. and when "reality" shows claim to not have writers at all or won't allow their writers to organize [wga.org]. Plus there's the issue of residuals for older content that wasn't even imagined when the shows were produced in the first place.

So yeah, it's a mess, and there's gonna be conflict in this arena for a while.

Re:You're kidding right?

[snuf23]

Uh, he goes to scifi.com and clicks on all their ad banners for 20 minutes a week.

Seriously though, the webisodes were free to view online. I think getting a torrent of them serves the same promotional purpose. IMO the best way to watch the 10 that were released is as the single recut episode that combines them all.

Watchmen

[dunsurfin]

DC Comics pulled a similar stunt on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons with Watchmen badges ("pins" to the American audience). The badges were sold in comic stores and used the iconic designs that Moore had envisioned and Gibbons had illustrated. DC Comics happily cashed the proceeds but did not send any of the profits to Moore and Gibbons since these were "promotional items." Alan Moore did not react well to this....

Re:It may be "promotional," but...

[Bishop923]

I'm sure that everyone got paid for the time they put in, just like anyone else with a normal job. This boils down to residuals, or a share of the profits from distribution. Imagine that you are a programmer working on some application. You get paid for the time you put in, but 99% of the time, it doesn't matter wether the company sells 1 copy or 1 million, you don't see a cut of the profits. The entertainment industry is different, since most of the jobs are short term contract work, the actors/writers/directors etc get paid x amount specified in their contract and they rely on residuals to get them thru the times when they don't have work.

In some ways it is hard to feel for either side, The networks are the typical bloated-big-company-screw-the-little-guy types and the creatives whine about not getting more money beyond what they were already paid.(I'd love to see the Photoshop team decide that they aren't going to deliver CS3 unless Adobe gives them a cut of each sale...)

Ultimately this is going to come to a head and the creatives will figure out that they don't need the networks to distribute their content

Re:free witing, but nbc owns it?

[bm_luethke]

One of the other issues is that revenue is not a standard term. If it were then you could negotiate that you garner a specific percentage of that revenue.

The problem is that no one will do gross. That is reasonable - there are many places where a real gross is really really high and the real net is zero or a loss. Take advertising for instance - pretty much all a loss (and this is where the OP is talking about). While it is purely a cost, it still increases net revenue by quite a bit.

If you do net then the studios play with costs - every thing becomes one and non-solid costs are greatly inflated. Say, for instance, one could say the five minutes by the studio exec to read over a document and sign it cost the company 5 million, to be deducted from the gross (and since it grossed 4 million that is a loss). Therefore you get no money. This occurs quite often.

If the studios were somewhat honest this wouldn't be such an issue. You could simply do a percentage of net income (or maybe even gross income). However the powers that be try and actively screw people out of money and are in a position to do so easily. Do all of them do it? I do not know - I suspect there are honest players out there who figure a happy well compensated employee makes you MUCH more than a screwed one (which is very true). However from my view it seems pretty much all the big players do not do this - including trying hard line DRM initiatives that screw customers (read - the RIAA and MPAA).

Eh, this is what a union is for. I've seen many cases where unions demand unreasonable ideas (it has resulted in more than one company moving labor out of country). Yet, this is precisely what they are intended to fix. If nearly everyone decides to do this there is no choice, if enough choose to go around the union then maybe it isn't that harsh on you and you need to re-evaluate your complaints. That's a free market for you.

Youtube, baby. Go watch them now.

[Picass0]

Go to Youtube.com and search for "galactica webisode" [youtube.com] and you'll find they've all been posted. If you use the Firefox browser, you can install the Videodownloader extension and that will let you save youtube videos to your harddrive. So say we all.

I'm still pissed you can't watch them outside US

[ip_freely_2000]

Talk about disrespect to the rest of the world.

Re:Problems across NBC Universal and ineptitude

[glenmark]

You make many valid points, but the original BSG did not suffer due to lack of resources. At the time it was made, it was the most expensive TV series ever made, costing ~$1M per episode. It went downhill after the first handfull of episodes due to poor writing.

Re:Problems across NBC Universal and ineptitude

[deblau]

TV doesn't "get" science fiction. These corporations are run by corporate suits with MBA's and degrees in marketing and have no soul and no imagination.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."

Sci-fi discusses ideas. The evening news discusses events. Reality shows discuss people.

Perhaps the TV execs just understand reality shows better than sci-fi. Chalk up another one to the soulless minions of (television) orthodoxy.