Fulldome Show Pricing – In Depth

Our firm T-shirt size pricing model

At Loch Ness Productions, we are trying to show the world there’s a better way to price shows.

We’re producers. We create movies. So I have to wonder: Why should the amount of money we get for our movies be dependent on the physical construction of the customer’s theater, or their attendance? We have our own costs for production, distribution, promotion to cover — things we have a modicum of control over. Where the customer’s projector is located (in a fixed dome or portable), how many people are in the seats (if there are seats), whether admission is charged, what the dome diameter is — none of those things affect our costs for producing and distributing shows. Those are the customer’s concerns and responsibilities, not ours.

It makes more sense to have our potential income be dependent on things we can be responsible for, factors we can control.

What we control is the deliverable. And our deliverable is the movie file.

Loch Ness Productions has pioneered a pricing structure that works fairly for all theaters, regardless of their dome size, seating capacity, attendance, or any other metric or factor beyond our control.

It’s based simply and solely on the size of the movie file we deliver to the customer.

We call it “T-shirt size pricing”. All we need to know from a customer is, “What size movie do you want?”

We make movies in the optimal size range of every fulldome projector system. That’s what we ship. Here’s an example of our grid. Note: these are just generic placeholder prices, not what we charge for every show!

MOVIE SIZE	For systems projecting circles that are:	20-YEAR LICENSE
SMALL/MEDIUM	smaller than 2000 pixels (or prewarped)	$2,500
LARGE/X-LARGE	larger than 2000 pixels	$5,000
SLICED	sliced for multiple projectors	$7,500

(Back in 2013, we had five tiers, singling out 1K, 2K, 3K, and 4K systems. You may still find a producer or two sticking to our old 5-tier model. But as of this writing in 2020, projector technology has evolved such that 1K systems are pretty much extinct, and even little domes upgrading are jumping right to 4K.)

Our T-shirt size model is really that simple. Customers get the concept very quickly.

The ultimate price most theaters pay is often nearly the same using either the “annual attendance” or our “T-shirt size” model. The major difference is the replacement of the honor-system attendance reports with concrete pixel dimensions.

In our model, there’s no need to argue about how big or small the theater is. There’s no need to “fudge the figures” for how many people get seated every year. None of that matters. For us, it’s just “What size movie do you want?” Once the customers look at that level on our grid, they can see the price clearly and unambiguously. There’s nothing to negotiate.

In our model, the prices go up as the movie’s resolution does, because it costs us more to deal with bigger movies. We (and our rendering computers) have to do more and more work. It takes longer to copy, render, and transfer, because the movie files are larger. We have to use more costly media to hold the bigger files. As with many other things in life (like T-shirts), the bigger they are, the more expensive they are.

With both models, the smallest theaters tend to get the lowest prices. Most of their projectors are of the lower resolution, so they get our SMALL/MEDIUM movie size. This tends to include most portables, too — but again, we’re considering only our movie size, not whether the customer’s dome is portable.

Today there are only a few fulldome projector models that can show single fisheye movies in our LARGE/X-LARGE size category. But the future will likely bring more. I predict 4K single-channel fisheye movies will become a de facto standard.

I think if a theater can afford the elevated price tags for some of these larger systems, they should be able to afford the higher-priced movies to show on them. Truth be told, I hear few complaints from those theaters. They know they’re paying for higher-resolution movies up front, and that’s what they want.

That brings us to the issue of slicing. This can indeed be costly, in terms of time and resources, with hours-long data transfer times to and from the render farm server, tying-up of computers for hours (or days) cranking out multi-channel MPGs and MKVs, elaborate and tedious QC’ing (and redos), hard drives, FedEx shipping. A single-channel show costs us relatively little in comparison to all the folderol we have to go through for a multi-projector show.

The highest-resolution movie from our highest-resolution dome masters — that’s the premium prime rib entree with the port wine demi-glace. It costs the most on the menu, but the customer is getting the best cut of meat, and paying for all the chef’s additional preparations.

Here again, if the customers are able to afford all the hardware these big systems require, they should be able to afford what it takes to get the hi-res shows to feed those projectors, or else they may have made a big budgeting miscalculation.

We think our pricing model is better for the customer, and for producers as well. The money we get is based on our own performance and product qualities, not the for-better-or-worse performance of the recipient, based on conditions that may or may not be relevant and certainly aren’t under our control. Asking customers to fit into a metric that doesn’t apply to them does not make for a happy sales or purchasing experience.

So far, I’ve convinced many other producers we distribute to use our T-shirt size pricing model. But not all, alas. To those, I say, “If you want us to follow your attendance-based tier structure, we can — but Loch Ness Productions is trying to set a better example for the industry otherwise. We prefer to be accountable to you!”

---

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