Fulldome Show Pricing – In Depth

Who produces fulldome movies

Sources for fulldome shows fall into three basic categories — planetaria, hardware vendors, and independent producers.

No matter in which of the three classifications the show producer is, their show’s production costs are real. How do they recoup them?

Planetaria

Planetaria have always produced shows. The process of writing a script, recording a soundtrack, creating visuals, and combining them all for the dome theater — has remained constant for decades, and continues today. Most planetaria carve out portions of the operating budget for shows — either to produce themselves, or to buy from outside sources.

If they create their own shows, planetaria don’t have to sell any show licenses to other theaters to be successful. They are serving their own audiences, the people coming in through their own doors. That’s why they’re there, that’s what they’re supposed to do. In theory, that’s all they have to do. Their production costs are already covered by their own budgets.

Now, some planetaria do choose to share their shows with other theaters. While nothing requires them to charge money for their licenses, most do.

And that’s where the issue of what to charge comes in.

* Sometimes planetaria will get funding to create a show from a sponsor or other funding organization, partnering with a show production company, or some combination thereof. Once created, the show premieres at the “home” facility, and everyone is happy. Thereafter, these grant-funded productions are often distributed — and the question arises, who pays for the distribution? And that’s where the issue of what to charge comes in.

Hardware vendors

Fulldome began with big-ticket, multi-projector systems, which naturally involve big-ticket budgets. Even today, the bigger the theater, the higher the cost of the hardware. Those mondo video projectors don’t come cheap, the custom lenses are costly, and all the associated computers and video cards and software add up quickly.

Naturally, it follows that the bigger the theater, the more money they must have to afford it all. These theaters tend to be in big museums, the types that charge big-ticket admission prices.

If they have big budgets for hardware, naturally it follows they must have big budgets for what they show on that hardware. And the first shows created did tend to have big production budgets too.

Also, in the beginning, the hardware vendors needed shows to sell systems. So they created some themselves, sometimes partnering with customer institutions to help pay for the production. They hoped the shows would act as an enticement for others to buy their hardware systems; some shows were held as exclusive to the vendor to show on their own equipment. With such enticing shows, the full show production costs could be recouped from future system installations, and be included as “part of the package”, or so the theory went.

It was only afterward — the second and third shows produced for a facility — that the realities of how to pay for a show production came to become more significant. Shows cost money to make, of course. Where does that money come from, when it isn’t built into the cost of the construction project? Sales of show licenses is one answer, of course.

And that’s where the issue of what to charge comes in.

Independent producers

Unless they’re working on a commissioned project, independent producers pretty much rely on recouping their show’s production costs solely through income from its distribution — the license fees that theaters pay.

In the beginning, there were very few independent producers and those that were around mostly relied on the hardware vendors to distribute their works. There wasn’t any other practical way to get shows into theaters, especially with the proprietary slicing/encoding required for use in the fulldome systems of the time.

It wasn’t until single-projector fulldome systems were introduced that the “democratization” of fulldome came about. When movies didn’t have to be sliced for multiple projectors, proprietary encoding software wasn’t needed.

These single-projector systems were both relatively low-resolution and low-cost, which made them popular with traditionally budget-strapped planetaria.

Producers loved them too. Not only were there more potential outlets for their work, but they could afford to buy their own fulldome systems themselves. They could build their own small domes, and be able to see their work in progress whenever they wanted. That’s what we did — we needed our own fulldome monitor. No longer was it necessary to rely on getting a big dome to expend resources on slicing, and give up valuable theater time, just to see production dailies and tests.

The fledgling market took off, with hundreds of smaller installations going in each year. That meant more places to sell more movies to.

And that’s where the issue of what to charge comes in.

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There was no real marketplace for shows in the beginning, because there were so few theaters to show them in. Once they began proliferating, that’s when the concept of “fulldome show as a separate product” took hold. Eventually, all theaters run through the bundled shows that come with their systems and want more.

And Loch Ness Productions was there.

Just as we pioneered the concept of the “planetarium show package” back in the classic heyday (before us, only other planetarium theaters distributed their shows; we were the first independent source for shows that wasn’t already a planetarium), we were pioneers at producing fulldome shows as a consumer item, not part of a hardware bundle. We strove to make our shows compatible with every fulldome system, so the hardware they would show on would not be a limiting factor.

We spent several years creating new fulldome shows from our classic show catalog, and we too had to figure out how to pay for all our efforts.

And that’s where the issue of what to charge comes in.

Page 1 – Overview
Page 2 – Who produces fulldome movies
Page 3 – What to charge, and squishy pricing models
Page 4 – Our firm T-shirt size pricing model
Page 5 – Publishing prices and objections
Page 6 – Varying license terms