Limiting Your Audience

by Randy Landers

What if suddenly, without any notice, without getting the input of you, our devoted readers, we decided to secure all our stories so that you couldn't just pop in and read them at your leisure? What if we suddenly said, "Hey, we're created this registration required format so that you had to register in order to visit our site"? What if we locked the files so you couldn't save them, you could only read them while on site instead of downloading them and reading them later? What if the excuse that we gave you was "We want better control of our property" and "We want to track the numbers of our readers more closely"?

How many of you would put up with this sort of nonsense? Not many, I'd bet.

And yet this is the very thing that Star Trek: New Voyages intends to do. One of their strengths was the easy availability of their fan films throughout the Internet. You could find the episodes pretty much anywhere on the net, download them, save them to your computer or to a CD or DVD, and watch them at your leisure.

But they've got plans to change all that.

They're going to make it so that you can only sit down and watch a streaming video that will be security locked so it can't be saved to your computer or saved to CD or DVD so that you can sit down with your family. And if you do, they will say you've "stolen" their property. The executive producer of New Voyages says he wants accurate numbers of people who are viewing their films, when in truth, he's just decided that he wants to limit where and when you can view the episodes. Admittedly, they're his property, but by limiting access in this manner, he's limiting his audience!

This marketing blunder falls on the heels of the world-wide web debut of their newest episode "World Enough and Time": yet another marketing blunder of outstanding proportions. The premier was to be held live at a red-carpet event and the episode was scheduled to be debuted live streaming on the web. They were completely unprepared for the event and the logistics of such a streaming video event. The event never made it live to the web (although a few people managed to save the file to Torrent-style sites). It was a nightmare trying to log on to view the episode and those that managed only saw a few minutes of the episode as the server quickly crashed. It quickly became a non-premier. 

The folks at Star Trek: New Voyages have done a phenomenal job in bringing the original series back to us fans. It's a pity that they're now doing their best (unintentionally, to be sure) to take it away from us fans. Their actions are going to kill the very audience that they want to reach.

And that's a damn shame.

Randy

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