A constant refrain we've heard from planetarium operators over the years is "We can't afford thousands of dollars for long-term show licenses". The advent of affordable online streaming services like VHX (now Vimeo OTT) made it possible for us to address this concern.

Until now, there hasn't been a practical way to make shows available for a very short or limited time, without shipping out the whole kit and caboodle and hoping things work out somehow. Now there is a way, with our FULLDOME OnDemand streaming service. Now we can offer the shows in our distribution catalog for rent, in addition to the traditional longer-term licenses. FULLDOME OnDemand is not intended to be a replacement for those; we expect license sales to continue as they always have.

We did some math, starting with the common prices set by producers for typical 10-year licenses. You can see them in our distribution catalog, on each show's Prices page; here's an example. For the smaller theaters that are the prime demographic for FULLDOME OnDemand, show licenses cost $5,000 on average. We figured someone who buys the license might play the show once a week over that time span. 500 plays for $5,000 = $10/play.

Of course, some shows cost more; $5000 is the average figure we used. If you say a show might get played twice a week instead of once, the per play cost drops by half. Or if you put in 50 years for the license term (as our T-shirt model uses), the per play cost drops down to pennies, in some cases.

While most spherical mirror systems are in portables, there are some in smaller fixed domes. Most have less than 10,000 attendance. But even if we say they were up in the <30,000 tier, the per-play cost is close to $10 if they only play it once a week. If they play it more, even the most expensive show license still works out to less than $10 per play.

So, in general, $10 per play seems like a fair figure. Let's go with that. $10 per play, or $5,000 for 500 plays. Either way, the movie costs the same per play — less than your average pizza. Affordable? Absolutely!

Currently, our video streaming service doesn't offer rental options less than a 3-day period.

Piracy has been around since long before FULLDOME OnDemand came into existence. There are thousands of unencrypted fulldome movies floating around customer sites already. While most may be legitimately licensed, opportunities abound for unscrupulous copying, scraping or otherwise. Pirates are going to find a way to pirate, no matter what we do.

Any planetarian who would act in so unprofessional a manner is someone we weren't going to make legitimate sales to anyway. At least with FULLDOME OnDemand, we'll have gotten one payment for the rental, which is one more than we would have gotten otherwise. And with our rentals being such a reasonable cost, most planetarians recognize the value of our service, and won't want to jeopardize its future availability.

We think Spotify may be spot-on with their philosophy of "Why pirate when you can afford to stream legally, and the artists get paid?" Unlike Spotify, though, we're not paying creators fractions of cents for their works. Producers get the lion's share of their show's rental fee. It's about as fair and equitable as we can make it for all involved.

No, and no.

When Loch Ness Productions started making Geodesium albums available in digital download and streaming form, we figured sales of our higher-ticket items — compact discs — would dry up. We thought, "why would anyone pay $13 for a CD (plus shipping) when they can just download a track for 99 cents?" Well, it turned out our worrying was unnecessary. Disc sales continued just as they had been. And a few additional pennies started showing up, from iTunes, Amazon, Spotify... and other sources we'd actually never heard of. The thing about those pennies is, they continue to show up month after month, over and over again. They add up. Moreover, those analog sales involved shipping costs to get discs to warehouses and customers, and of course there's our own warehousing costs, packaging and all too. Digital sales operate more efficiently.

It's the same with FULLDOME OnDemand. Big-ticket licenses continue to sell; nothing has changed with that business model. We now add a second income stream on top of that, where none was before. Spotify didn't devalue our Geodesium albums by streaming them. Before Spotify existed, we didn't have that revenue stream; now we do, and it keeps on coming. We won't turn it down! And with FULLDOME OnDemand rentals, you still get your chosen price (or perhaps more, depending on how you value the per-play cost). You just get it in smaller portions (and in near real-time), rather than all in one big upfront pre-payment. Think pizza by the slice.

You can get an idea from one of our year-end reviews, posted in our blog:

What rentals (and whose) were hot...

First, send us a link to a preview of your show, so we can see what you're talking about.

Unless we see something objectionable, we'll then reply with some questions about how you'd like to price your show (see how others are doing it). Assuming a reasonable response from you, we'll send some legalese: a Distribution Agreement that allows us do what we say we're going to do in general, and a Program Order for each show that spells out the specifics, including the money split.

If you're in agreement with all this, here's a checklist of what you need to send us:

    the completed, signed distribution agreement and program order.

    the encoding fee. A check is always welcome; we can do PayPal too, perhaps easier for international customers.

    a USB drive with your show content. We'll keep your drive for insurance, as one of our backups. (Read this presentation we made at the 2014 IMERSA Summit Ingestion Indigestion for guidelines on what we want to see on the drive you send.) In summary:

When we get all that from you, we'll get to work encoding and preparing the Web pages. We'll let you know when things are ready, for you to give one last quality check.