“Pioneer One”, a TV-show that was created for and made possible by P2P users, appeared to be extremely popular earlier this year – about a million users have downloaded the pilot episode. Despite the fact that it was created and distributed exclusively at BitTorrent, the innovative model couldn’t go unnoticed by TV-insiders: the series won an award for “Best Drama Pilot” at the New York Television Festival. Now, the second episode is already released, and 2 more are promised to follow in the forthcoming weeks.
Six months ago filmmakers Josh Bernhard and Bracey Smith decided to set themselves up with quite a challenge: after they finished a script for the new TV-series called “Pioneer One”, instead of offering it to traditional TV-companies, the creators made a decision to fund and distribute the film online.
And they did it! The duo cooperated with the VODO BitTorrent distribution platform for distribution and promotion, and managed to collect the first $6,000 for shooting the pilot episode, which was eventually released in the early summer via VODO and quickly gained an amazing audience.
After hundreds of thousands of P2P users had viewed the show, they decided to donate money for future episodes: the donations scaled to another $20,000 in just 2 weeks and went on increasing until it was enough to shoot more episodes of the 1st season. The show creators realized that they had to do more than one episode at a time in order to make it cost-effective and timely, so they took time to prepare and managed to start shooting in fall.
Three more episodes were shot in October, and the first of them has already been released on VODO. Of course, just as the pilot episode, this one is available for downloading for free. Soon two more episodes will be released, and the team hopes to gather enough funds to complete the first season, which will have 7 episodes in total.
“Pioneer One” relies entirely on the BitTorrent community, so the release of the new episode is promoted by lots of P2P partners, including being bundled with new installs of uTorrent client. It will be curious to watch how the public will pick up the new episode. While the creators have high hopes, they still realize that the success of the pilot won’t be matched so easily. However, they believe that the 2nd episode is a step above the pilot.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article
No comments:
Post a Comment