BronyDoc – Piracy Crash and Burn

My Little Pony 34 comments
Dumb Lampost by ~cactusheart

Dumb Lampost
by ~cactusheart

jdlbronydo[1]

Well talk of this announcement started last night with John de Lancie making an announcement that BronyDoc was shutting down production. The reason? Piracy.

According to the official announcement found on their kickstarter page they are canceling plans to invest more time and money into releasing a disc with additional materials and segments. We’ve heard about some of these additional materials such as actual statistical data on the fandom and a much longer and in depth interview with Lauren Faust, along with random stories and footage that didn’t make it into the final cut.

Because the piracy within the Brony community is rampant and pervasive we’ve come to the conclusion that investing any more time and energy would be not be worthwhile.

Which is not surprising since this is a community built on the cornerstone of freely distributing high definition copies of MLP episodes and have done so since Season 1.

Do not take “shutting down production” as in game over for the film. They will still be producing the blu-ray/dvds, shopping this out to film festivals, Netflix and other distribution locations.

Official Press Release via BronyDoc Kickstarter:

Here is the latest

Production Shut-Down
You may have heard that we are shutting down production. For clarification, this refers to canceling plans to invest more time and money into releasing a disc with additional material and segments that have already been shot but didn’t make it into the film. We have many great stories that just didn’t fit into the flow of what we were creating with the film but thought the Brony community would really enjoy seeing. Because the piracy within the Brony community is rampant and pervasive we’ve come to the conclusion that investing any more time and energy would be not be worthwhile.

Unlike those of you who actually contributed to the creation of the film, there are those who feel the tremendous support we received was simply a financial bonanza and don’t understand that we used the money to create the best possible film. They clearly don’t understand, appreciate or respect the work and feel that since in their view, you the supporters paid for it, they are entitled to get it for free.

Lesson learned, we are moving on and focusing on distribution to the mainstream public.

Discs
We are on deadline to deliver the masters to the disc replicator early next week. The process of creating the Blu-Ray was more complicated than excepted. The replicator takes about three weeks, then we ship. Most will be happy to hear that we decided to go with a Blu-Ray / DVD combo pack. There is one 2-disc pack with the main film and one 2-disc pack with the extended interviews bonus disc. I’ve included the cover art for those who are interested. We will be ordering extra discs (both main film and bonus disc) and plan on having them available for sale on Amazon.

Netflix & iTunes & Amazon
We have started the process of placing the film on Amazon and iTunes. We expect the film to be available for purchase and rental in the next 60 days. Netflix is a much more complicated process. The first step is to even get into their database, then there needs to be a customer demand of people who have have requested the film for when it becomes available. We will make announcements as that process progresses.

Film festivals and public distribution
We have entered the film into some festivals and started the process of talking with distributors. We will make announcements as that process progresses.

Again, thank you to those who supported the film.

Mike & The Production Team

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  • Anonymous

    What the fuck were they even expecting?

    • You know, I really do not know. I’m assuming they expected people to respect their work and buy it, because this is the love and tolerance fandom.

      When it was announced that they were releasing the digital version first, my reaction was literally: What are they? Fucking stupid?

      From my understanding they did this because it was part of the agreement with the backers, but still, would have been smarter to release the blu-ray/dvd versions first.

      Either way our little editorial from last week had the distribution guy comment on it, and claimed they had sold at least 10,000 digital copies. At $12.99 a pop that is $129,900, so in rough theory they made back at least 1/3rd the budget. But keep in mind certain people didn’t get paid until this money came in, so that probably went quickly.

      As for continued production, I’m sure if they asked the general population, they could find people who would work as video editors in the production department for free. It is not like this fandom doesn’t have a long history of making videos.

      Oh well, I had some hope they might correct a few things, but they’ll now shopped this quickly slapped together digital version around and be laughed away from film festivals.

  • Anonymous

    What year are they living in? It’s 2013, if you don’t understand how the public nature of the Internet works, then you need to reassess how you go about doing things.

    “We are going to upload a video on the Internet and make it public for everyone who knows about it. I sure hope no one will betray our trust that we made up and upload it to other sites. Clearly, anyone who wants to buy and watch the documentary is a loyal, dedicated fan, even though we want to get the brony word out in the public.”

  • Canard

    It’s time for them to do some damage control. They’re basically blaming the fans who raised $300k to help create such a documentary, and who expected to show the world that MLP wasn’t what Fox News described it to be months ago. Both sides made huge efforts to support the very premice and realisation of that, but now the would-be customers are the one taking the blame.

    Also, the way they distributed it – limiting downloads, not mentioning the file sizes, not allowing resuming transfers, etc – was seen as a breach of trust. IIRC from a reddit thread, this was basically a management issue. The brony community is fantastic when it comes to supporting people who *trust* them; they made both the show and the comic a high commercial success (partly thanks to piracy, btw!) because they actively praised the amount of work put into it, but they might as take this success away if you decide not to play fair with them (see the ongoing S3E13 debacle).

    To the team: yes, you had high hopes. Yes, it could have worked well, and still can, but this is time for you to change your communication and reckon that you’ve made a mistake here. It’s time to do some damage control. Support your audience again, like you always did, and move forward to them – not against them. From experience, the core community easily forgives mistakes and usually manage to build awesome things on top of them. Trust it.

    [Deleted, as per your request –Doc]

  • Anonymous

    Who would want to pay money for a documentary about bronies circlejerking about how awesome they are?

    • Anonymous

      “Circlejerking bronies” is the target demographic, and those guys already paid their money to the kickstarter fund.

      • Canard

        The expectations when the kickstarter was launched was not circlejerking, actually. The main motivation was to react after medias attacked the MLP fans (see: Fox vs Bronies), to showcase the particular state of mind the community has (had?).

        • Anonymous

          “(see: Fox vs Bronies)”
          I think the motivation here makes all the difference in how this is viewed by normal freaking people.

          Have you even seen those videos? one is from a RADIO HOST who is GUEST on a segment on a LOCAL FOX AFFILIATE and the other is from “Red Eye” a 3am comedy show meant to appeal to stoners and drunks (no, seriously), For some perspective:
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oderus_Urungus
          that guy? hes not just GWAR’s frontman, hes red eye’s “Interstellar correspondent”
          Dont forget this is the same program and station where Mike Baker (Former CIA op, current Red Eye cast member) made fun of glenn beck with this (http://tinyurl.com/bal53oy) and the Host of the show Greg Gutfeld is not only obsessed with unicorns but has actually admitted on air he was a hypocrite for making fun of bronies:
          http://tinyurl.com/76wv5r8

          Now Its true, I am a fan of red eye, so some of this was more from memory than anything else, but to get the sources wasnt hard, and anybody who spent just 5 minutes looking past the silly videos on youtube could see that their “love and tolerance” not only failed them, but caused them to lash out of the wrong people, Preferring to lump everyone into one, big entity they could easily hate.

          People who ARENT bronies and werent acting hilariously out of their supposed element could easily see what was really going on. No matter what they claim was, the expectations were always about circlejerking, feeling like victims and trying to convince each other that they are special.

          Whats really hilarious is that while bronies jerk each other off with their tears of “Oh why cant everyone love us, fluttershy?” (because of course, they dont actually watch the show and the “lessons” they take away are fabrications of the fandom) There are other groups of people accused of far worse than being freaks, who dont complain about it.

  • Anonymous

    Blaming piracy for your own distribution problems and refusal to join the 21st century. Where have I heard this before?

    • RedEyesPonyCorrespondent

      Delance should cry a river with kotick

  • Carly

    It seems weird to stop production on a product funded by donations.. it’s sad, but i don’t know. :/

  • They should make a new Kickstarter to get those bonus materials out.

    • No. They were paid more than enough to get those bonus materials out. They should be getting those bonus materials out. They are not the victims of piracy. The funders are the victims of backwards thinking and butthurt.

  • Ethan

    Were going to donate money, than we have to bye it and now its not even coming out nice business scam

  • Anonymous

    Seeing as they’re not actually releasing the hard details of their financial situation it’s highly likely this is all a ruse to just generate more interest and guilt bronies into giving them even more money.

  • Bart

    One thing that bugs me about this… Did de Lancie and crew actually make a documentary about Bronies and not discover that piracy is the second biggest reason the fandom exists in the first place? I mean, full HD copies of every episode hit YouTube and other video servers within two hours of airing on the Hub, and the majority of Bronies have a pirated copy of most–if not all–episodes on their hard drives. How can you /possibly/ be surprised by something that part of the bedrock of the very fandom you set out to document?

    • Bart

      something *that’s part

    • Anonymous

      This documentary wasn’t about bronies, rather it was about a group of bronies attempting to exhibit a perspective of themselves that would find approval in outsiders. It’s just self masturbatory drivel really.

  • Reg1000

    Except that the MLP episodes were broadcast in the first place. They were “pirated” because few people had the Hub. This was a documentary created by a fan favorite actor where some of the crew put off being paid. They asked you not to pirate because people needed to get paid and to get the film into key festivals for wider exposure and distribution. This thing was a shout out to the fandom the likes of which has never been seen, and the bronies have basically said “eff you”, and make all sorts of excuses to defend their entitled, selfish scumbag behavior. Make all the excuses you want, you people are utter filth. True representatives of the privileged, personality disordered 21st century generation of fools.

    I hope the show staff and anyone else connected with MLP erect a giant wall between them and you and just stick with making a great cartoon.

    • Anonymous

      Get off your high horse, the MLP fandom is nothing special. The friggin thing got as big as it did through piracy. They asked for 60k, they got 300+ and they still made a lousy pandering to the fan base.

      I’m a fan of the show, not a fan of the Fan base that watches the show. Apparently so is everyone else as we don’t want to see the 6-8 die hard take it too seriously fans with this horseshit ‘MLP changed my life’ sob story. They are the 10% of the fandom that those of us who are normal people shake their heads at.

      They managed their money horribly, and are surprised and upset that a fan base that got as it is through piracy ends up pirating their product. They must work for the government because they can’t manage money they don’t have.

  • Okay first – a bit off topic, but who changed something on this site that prevents text from getting bigger when zoomed in? I am using a tv as a monitor and the text is too small with your newest css / js change.

    The whole piracy butthurt thing is really pushing my politics button. I mean, I looked at the discussion on twitter, and it’s the whole “piracy has victims” and all that nonsense. It makes me sick. Then the people that suggest a second kickstarter? WHY would they need more money to finish something they were already funded to do? As far as I know, this was not a big studio thing where a smaller studio is set up and then billed like crazy to the point where the movie never turns a profit. (An example would be Star Wars Episode 3.)
    I funded enough for a bonus disc with the interviews, and I expected to get a bonus disc with the interviews.

    They say piracy is stealing. No it is not stealing. It is making a copy. They say it is hurting sales. Not really. People who pirate something generally never intend to buy it in the first place. If they can get their hands on it, they will, but if they can’t, who’s to say they would care enough to actually buy it?

    This rant would have been on the kickstarter comments, but I used paypal. So no commenting privileges for me. And twitter’s format doesn’t support rage.

    • SBF1

      You’re kinda skewed on the piracy issue, my man – most pirates actually have a deeper method to their madness.

      Yes, there are some people who pirate stuff simply because they don’t want to pay. That happens.

      Most pirates, however, pirate stuff so they can see if they will get their money’s worth. Once I pirated a DS game to see if I would get my money’s worth for buying it. I tried the ROM and I enjoyed it immensely, and so I went out and bought a legitimate copy of the game. I pirated it, but also bought it because I found it to be worth paying for.

      The documentary is the other side of that. People pirated it because they wanted to see if it was worth paying 13 dollars for. The documentary was not worth paying 13 dollars for, and so nobody supported it. Blaming piracy is not the whole answer – the Bronydoc staff shares some of the blame for not making a product worth the price.

      It’s a bit of a strange, slightly-twisted version of quality control; effort alone does not earn a gold star, the product itself has to be good-quality. The Bronydoc staff (and the people who defend the documentary via blind praise) are too prideful and emotionally invested in the project to understand that people aren’t buying it because it’s not worth buying.

      • None of what you have stated is false, or new to me, it just didn’t make it into this particular rant.

        And yes, I am a little mad that the thing I was afraid of the outcome (Brony Thank-you project) ended up being good, and the thing that I was looking forward to ended up failing on the casting call, (I do think that the lazer pon3 guy shows the best story – not perfect but better than the others). I’m glad it won’t end up in walmart, but this kind of thing always hits a nerve with me.

        • SBF1

          Being mad is totally understandable, but in your case it’s justified. I don’t entirely remember, but I think you mentioned elsewhere that you were a doc backer, right? You don’t sound like you really viewed the documentary as a “necessary thing” (the crazier fans I’ve talked to have described it as that), and you just gave it a little backing just because. That’s totally fine.

          What gets my goat is the fact that the Bronydoc staff have… well, the gall to complain about piracy, not-selling, etc etc, when if they’d done the proper research they would have known about this sort of thing. It’s a pet peeve of mine when people act like they know a lot of info about something, yet they clearly didn’t do any research (which is why whenever I do something like a game review or talk about drama or whatnot, I do as much research as possible so I don’t make a fool of myself).

          It’s like watching your typical Deviantart chucklenuts. They aren’t realizing that their product is not worth the cash, and trying to push the blame on anything other than themselves. Given that I’m pretty sure everyone who worked on the documentary is older than I am, it’s kind of discouraging that they’d act in such a… well, immature way.

          • Well, turns out that is an extra extra content DVD, I got a email reply confirming about that.

            And the reason I’m not insane about it is because I keep myself open minded for the sake of growing smarter, and my feel of it being necessary dissolved over time due to various things like the Jerry Springer thing being a flop, noticing that nobody cared in the long run about what Howard Stern said about us, and stuff like that. It wasn’t until I gave up on flipping out for people posting clop in public trending streams on G+ that I finally gave up fighting the chance of negative stereotypes. (still… can never let my family know that word.)

    • Doc

      We haven’t changed the CSS or Javascript recently, and it zooms in just fine on Firefox (Granted, I’m using Linux). Might it just be your web browser?

      • Chrome / Windows 8 / 36″ TV

        But silly me… I forgot to put my glasses on. That’s what the problem was. [[derp]]

        • I checked into it earlier, seems to be something with chrome. We haven’t changed anything internally with the site, but that doesn’t mean wordpress didn’t update or a wire got crossed, we’ll look into it.

  • David

    One thing about the “oh noes, pirates killed our movie” complaint. See, I did EVENTUALLY pay my $12 to purchase the film… but only after a long, exhaustive search to FINALLY find where it was hosted at. There was no mention of the digital copy for sale at their Kickstarter page, and it wasn’t turning up in the first page of Google results either. I found it easily at Pirate Bay; it took me forever to find their legitimate distribution site.

    I feel the same way about this as I do artists who won’t list their music on either iTunes or Amazon for whatever reason: if you’re not going to make it easy for me to give you money, or make the product available to me in other ways, I’m going to go with the path of least resistance (I.e. “Yarrr….”) I set out with the intention of giving them money, but almost settled for a torrented version because it was the only version I could find.

    Now, I don’t know what percentage of bronies shared my frustrations in that regard, but I just wanted to throw it out there as a reason why they (almost) lost one sale to piracy.

  • Anonymous

    I just want to download and watch the Documentary. Anyone know where I can purchase it? scrnland.com does not work for me for some reason. I keep getting “HTTP Error 500 (Internal Server Error): An unexpected condition was encountered while the server was attempting to fulfill the request.” everytime I try to load the page.

    • Anonymous

      bronydoc.com

  • Anonymous

    Why do people insist on using 19th and 20th century business models in the 21st Century, and then complain when it doesn’t work! its a given that any film/tv series will suffer piracy. So work with it, release a low bit-rate version for free, and sell the full HD. The low bit-rate mpegs could even be used as a discount on the full price. So, Movie at cinema, simultaneous release of low bit-rate version for free on your website page with adds on the page, after cinema run Full HD release with discount for those that downloaded the film from your website. Yes initial ticket sales will take a hit, but you make that up with adverts on your website. that’s a 21st century business model that could work! I personally cant afford £10 for a cinema ticket, but would put up with an advert or two on a webpage if I got to see the movie, then a small discount on the full purchase if I like it, simple.

  • Dann
  • Piper

    I have a lot of respect for DeLancie and what I know of his attitudes towards the fandom. A lot more than many other of the performers and crew, anyway. I think he is definitely frustrated and justifiably so. He is about equally as justifiably frustrated as me for offering to buy just the Hub from the local cable company and being told I cannot instead I have to buy a 50 channel package for 100 bucks a month, so I can watch 30 minutes of MLP four times a month (when its in season), or about 50 dollars an hour and that does not include the fact I have to watch the trash adverts all episode long.