Fox needed to find a way to monetize these fans. Getting standard network advertising rates for fanatical followers is leaving way too much money on the table.
This was 2003 no TiVo even, and Fox doesn't really do traditional syndication.
Scifi is expensive to make a scifi show has to outperform the competition to survive simply because of production costs.
This is why Shows like Buffy or X-Files worked because they didn't really need anything to set up the world, no need for expensive sets or special effects (buffy had some but you could always just do a filler episode with not much going on to balance the seasonal budget) a high school/small town setting and rural new jersey with a few wind breakers and 2 rental cars isn't going to break anyone's bank.
And also when Fox did try to monetize fans, the fans didn't coughed up the cash, Serenity made 25M at the US box office just to put it into perspective, xXx State of the Union and freaking DOOM made more money than Serenity.
To be fair, Serenity was a much weaker movie, as a stand-alone thing. It failed to expand beyond the core fan base much. A relative of mine went to see it 6 times during the opening weekend to goose the numbers, but only because he was a fan of the show.
Yeah I also had the odd acquaintance that did the same, ironically 99.9% of my other friends who claim to be "fans" and that Firefly is the "best thing ever" never bothered.
I don't think most of them even waited for it to come out on DVD but most likely pirated it and maybe bought it once it hit the bargain bin.
Various excuses have been used from "I don't want to see an episode in the theater" to "I don't want to give Fox money" but it doesn't really matter, people didn't came out to see it, and even the DVD sales unlike Firefly were pretty weak.
Anecdotally your friend that went to see it 6 times is also likely the reason why Firefly gets more votes cast on IMDB than The X-Files or Seinfeld.
"Various excuses have been used from "I don't want to see an episode in the theater" to "I don't want to give Fox money"
I heard similar from some of my friends. I kept trying to explain to them that Fox wouldn't make any money from the movie, which was released by Universal. (Fox had long since passed on continuing the show/property in any form. Fans should have been supporting Universal for picking up what it believed Fox didn't handle well, and for attempting to give the series a new lease on life. In fact, Uni had intended to make a trilogy.)
Looks like you are correct, for some reason I felt it was introduced in the mid 2000's.
I'm actually surprised that they managed to produce a cost effective and functional DVR in 1999.
How was the quality? the earliest DVR's I can remember are the Samsung DirectTV ones from the mid 2000's.
But then again it seems that the 90's and early 2000's are a blur to me, I was surprised to "discover" today that The Mask of Zoro came out in 2005 the same year as Serenity I had surely pegged it to be considerably older.
I'm actually surprised that they managed to produce a cost effective and functional DVR in 1999.
Even in 1999 I was thinking, "why didn't someone do this sooner?" It was a VCR with a hard drive instead of tape. Not to trivialize Tivo'S accomplishment, there's a lot more to it than that, but the know-how was there as well as the hardware. Granted, hard drives back then were pretty tiny, but so were the shows in standard def. As for "cost-effective", well, the MSRP wasn't cheap, that's for sure, and there was a monthly fee (one of the earliest examples I know of "stuff that doesn't need a subscription to work that requires a subscription").
Quality? As good as what came down that coax wire, IIRC. In other words, compared to today's high-def stuff, it sucked. But that wasn't Tivo'S fault.
It wasn't a VCR with a hard drive, VCR's for the most part used an analogue format unless you had some of the few digital ones that were super expensive and used for productions.
In 1999 making a cost effective DVR couldn't have been that easy, the hardware was pretty puny and storage was expensive.
A ~16 GB hard drive alone in 1999 would cost 250-350$ [0]
A TV tuner card capable of MPEG-2 encoding on chip would cost around 300-400$, at least that was the price in around 2000-2001 when I got a hercules DVR card.
The software ones required an Intel MMX CPU to do encoding and those were both cutting edge and expensive, so the fact that TiVO managed to release a viable consumer product at a reasonable price was pretty f-ning amazing.
It would have been hard to do a TiVo or ReplayTV much before those companies did it. You don't have to go much further back in time before sufficiently large hard disks would probably have been too pricey. In addition, I don't think consumer computer-based tuner boards came about all that much earlier. And, like the early TiVos, you'd have had to support plugging it into a phone line to get the subscription service.
The bottom line is that I could imagine an expensive, low capacity DVR a couple years before they actually appeared but I'm not sure there would have been a viable commercial market for such.
There was. And I'm actually still using mine, having paid a transfer fee, on the TiVo I'm still using. It wasn't cheap though. I think I paid $300-400 dollars and that was quite a few years ago.
