The real reason why this farce was made...
I'm a firm believer in fixing the real problem rather than attacking "symtoms". So I want to make 100% sure everyone understands why we are REALY dealing with this crap and why things like Farscape are also being screwed up. There are 2 major causes.
One is the fact that Vivendi/Universal owns Sci-Fi channel. Why is that a big deal? Universal Studio's has been around forever. Well see in y2k the idiot from Segram's Liquor that bought Universal a few yrs earlier sold the whole thing to a French Company called Canal Group. So Universal isn't even owned or run by americans any more its run by the french. Throw in there that there French Economy is even worse than the US and what do you get? You get them bleeding Universal dry to keep the parent company afloat.
So basicaly they do anything that makes QUICK money. Thus they won't wait or Richard Hatch's idea because that would take an extra yr+ to get off the ground because whats his name has to finish X2 first etc etc. So they go with the quick buck and threw it to the wolves. We just got unlucky that two of the biggest idiots got it.
Then we have Farscape. Its makeing money. ITs got a fan base. Accept its high budget minimal profit. You know spend 800k per EP and make 200k profit. They would rather spend 300k per EP on scare tactics and make 300k profit (not exact numbers). The idea being is it ties up less money yet it makes the same profit. Who cares what the fans think.
Secoundly the big problem here is the neilson ratings system. I'm sorry but long ago when we had 3-6 major channels / networks there system worked fine. You could take the equivlence of a "poll" with a 2-5% margine of error and get numbers like 15% 35% 50% and know that the guy with 50% realy had the best show so he should get the big advertiseing bucks. Now you have 100+ cable channels and like 10 "networks" so the numbers are like 3% 5% 6% and so on. Getting 15+% of the market is like a huge deal now accept with a "poll" type setup were MATHMATICALY you have a 2-5% margine of error yet your claiming they got 2.1% of the market to watch the show is just fracking insian. I mean felgercarb if you count the error margine twards the posative side you DOUBLE or TRIPLE your viewers. The whole entire system they use is totaly flawed for what it does and it is a big huge LIE to the advertisers. More importantly in many cases it TOTALY screws over the small shows. Especialy the nitch stuff like sci-fi.
To sum this up if you fixed the rateing system to be a larger sample of ppl to reduce the margine of error. PLUS you get the damm french out of american companys. We might just MIGHT get some decent sci-fi.
I firmly believe you should not point out a problem unless you have a solution but at this point short of nuking France I don't have one. I'm open to suggestions though?
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