Fulldome Show Pricing – In Depth

Varying license terms

A separate issue in the whole pricing picture has to do with the length of the license term.

Loch Ness Productions began issuing licenses for our own shows back in the days of the classic planetarium slide/tape packages. Once we did, though, we were quickly inundated with questions about how long the license would be good for.

The concept of “term limits” hadn’t occurred to us. All we originally wanted to do was to grant permission for the customer to show the thing, and we would be done with it.

Initially, we wanted to say “Well, the term is perpetual”. But our lawyers told us that using the term “in perpetuity” was inadvisable because we can’t practically enforce or guarantee what will happen one hundred or one thousand years from now. So we set our term at 50 years. For our purposes, we figured that’s close enough to being perpetual.

It’s like a “lifetime buy-out”, with “lifetime” being the practical life of the show. We doubt today’s fulldome projector technology will still be around 50 years from now. Beyond the year 2070, we’re not likely to be around to deal with renewals anyway. (I hope we’ll have followed Larry to the Moon!)

So, for the shows we’ve produced ourselves, our 50-year license means nobody has to worry about the license term expiring. It’s just not an issue.

But sure enough, other producers have worked into their pricing grids the concept of shorter-term licenses, priced less than longer-term licenses. While some offer the same lifetime buyout length of 50 years as we do, others limit theirs to 20, 10, or maybe even only 1 or 2 years.

Given the lengthy preceding discussion about movie producers setting their prices based on their own production costs, I don’t see how, philosophically, shorter licenses make sense. Why should a movie cost less if the customer runs it less? What the end-user theater does with a show after it’s been produced — how often they run it, how many people see it — doesn’t affect our costs for making and distributing the thing.

The concept of longer licenses costing more has led to some customer questions positing the inverse. They say, “I don’t want the show for 50 years, I only want it for six months” and then expect the license cost to be proportionally less. It’s as if we could somehow take the 50-year price, divide it into days (or hours or minutes), and only charge for the time the customer actually wants to pay for.

I have to remind them that for the shows we distribute, it’s the producers who set the terms and prices, not us. Even for our own shows, it’s not like we’re shipping a cheaper-quality product if they only run it for a year instead of fifty. We ship them the same high-quality movie. Our production costs are the same, regardless of how long the customer runs it.

As it turns out, for the titles we distribute that offer shorter license terms, more often than not customers choose the longest-term periods anyway. They prefer to add shows to their repertoire, and then run them for years and years.

And fortunately, today’s streaming technology has allowed us to offer a solution to those who want shows for a really short term. FULLDOME OnDemand provides 3-7 day rentals of many popular fulldome shows, for the cost of a pizza or two!

2020 update: We decided to make 20-year terms the default for our show licenses, instead of 50. Primarily, the change came from people thinking they were having to pay more for a 50-year term. They weren’t, but now that concern is alleviated!

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