Last month we launched GateWorld Play, a new daily video channel -- and, I'm reasonably certain, the only Stargate video channel on the Web. This was a little brainchild of mine from last fall, which was conceived of as I thought about pushing GateWorld into the future with new Internet technologies.

Thanks to Flash video, more and more Web sites are publishing video features, and doing it on a regular basis. I love the video game site GameSpot, and they have been publishing video reviews of games, plus game trailers and other things provided by game publishers, for quite a while now. Over at TV Squad they have a regular video blog, talking about the week's developments in the entertainment world.

I would love to do stuff like that, and more. I would love to air official episode preview videos from SCI FI (which we are doing now) and DVD preview vids from MGM and FOX (which we are doing now), plus game trailers from Stargate Worlds (got it) and more. I would love to find a lovely and talented on-camera personality who will do a short, 3- to 5-minute video blog each week based on the latest Stargate news and special features at GateWorld. (If that is you, e-mail me!)

So I approached David Read, our genius of all things multimedia, and stuck a bug in his ear. I knew it wouldn't take much talking it up to get David excited about the idea, and he has really taken the ball and run with it. Through the fall and the Christmas season David created a plan for all the different sections -- The Phenomenon, Classic Stargate, Fan Videos, Stargate VFX, Fun & Games, etc. -- each of which usually see a new update every week.

The new video channel has its own section, but also lives right on the home page. So when we have a big new video like a DVD preview (passed along by our friends at MGM and FOX Home Entertainment), you'll see it right there when the home page loads. And when we do video interviews, you'll be able to watch the entire interview in its entirety right on the home page.

A big part of what the video channel is all about is you. For years talented fans all over the world have been creating Stargate music videos and other creative works, and we want to give them a place to showcase their work. If you are one of those talented creatives, please contribute your work! Just visit www.gateworld.net/play to find out how.

Our plan right now is to run GateWorld Play as a daily-updated feature for its first three months. It is a lot of work for David to maintain, and of course he has other responsibilities on the site -- so after three months we are going to evaluate where the video channel is at, if we're meeting our goals, and how many hours per week it is taking from him. We might continue on daily, or we might scale back a bit -- but still have several new videos every week.

Your feedback on the video channel is therefore extremely valuable to us in this early stage! Let us know if you specifically come to the site looking for the new video; or if you only watch them when you are on the site and happen to notice something; and if having daily updates has caused you to visit the site more frequently.

It's time for another word about spoilers, and GateWorld's policy. This is a significant issue in TV fandom, and so it is something that is constantly on our radar screen, something about which we want to be sensitive and responsible.

During the Stargate production year, when the show films from February to October, GateWorld and several other fan sites (as well as general TV news and spoiler sites, such as SpoilerFix.com) publish spoiler reports on specific episodes that are being filmed, but which won't air for several weeks or months. Story information comes predominantly from casting "sides," actual pages of the script that are sent out so that agencies can help to cast guest roles. Sometimes it's a small part with a couple of pages, barely hinting at what is going on in the episode; other times we'll see a dozen different roles with enough pages to make up half the script.

It's a tough thing to manage, and every time I sit down to try and write a responsible episode report I feel as though I am playing with fire. There are many, many competitors to our site out there, and there are many sites that publish spoilers with reckless abandon. How can we put this material to good use -- a way that helps get people excited about the episode, provide them with reliable info, and still respect the show that we love and the people who make it?

If you ask the producers, I am sure they will tell you that we often get it wrong, that GateWorld and other sites that choose to publish spoilers often go too far. Perhaps that is a fair assessment. But let me speak a brief word in our defense, and try to frame the discussion in its proper context.

A Stargate episode is broken up into a teaser and five acts. GateWorld's official policy is that we will not reveal anything beyond Act 3, which generally leaves all the plot developments, twists, and reveals from the final one-quarter to one-third of the episode a mystery. Unofficially, we try to hold back more than that, leaving plenty of gaps and not divulging end-of-act moments. We want the report to raise questions as well as answer others, to give a description of how the logline premise (the 1-sentence description you might read in TV Guide) starts to play itself out. What we don't want is to describe each scene in minute detail so that, by the time Act 4 starts, you say to yourself, "OK, I've read up to this point on GateWorld -- now let's just see how it ends."

Other sites have gone much farther. Long ago I lost count of the number of fourth-act "reveals" that I sat on, which another site let fly with reckless abandon. Fans discussing the episode in forums and on mailing lists would link to those sites, because they had more information.

Even SCI FI Channel itself has been criticized for including spoilers from very late in the episode in their on-air promos. Early in Battlestar Galactica's second season, one promo even included the very last line of dialogue from the episode (Colonel Tigh's declaration of Marshal Law), a huge event which dramatically concluded an episode in which he was refusing to cross that line.


Fan sites and studios have an often tenuous, love-hate relationship. The studio provides the fan sites with great access, and the fan site promotes the show and facilitates the online community. The fan site and forum (I'm speaking generically here, not of GateWorld specifically or exclusively) come to be seen as the visual embodiment of a show's fan base. And so the studios want their fan sites to succeed and to thrive, and the sites want the shows to be endlessly successful, and its creators to be proud of the site's own work.

In the 10 to 15 years since the Internet fan site was born, however, an odd phenomenon has been born that introduces tension into that sympathetic relationship: spoilers. Many fans love 'em, most all writers hate 'em. Fans became very good at finding, collecting, and methodically analyzing information on unaired episodes. Today the spoiler phenomenon is more sophisticated and more prolific than ever.

The producers of a show can take one of two stances. They can actively fight spoilers by restricting the casting process, writing moratoriums into actor contracts about what they can talk about, challenging fan sites directly to not publish spoilers (Ron Moore recently took this approach with Battlestar Galactica, with a decent amount of success), and even release fake plot info ("foilers") to throw off the fans. Or, the producers can resign themselves to the fact that spoilers are now the nature of the fan world, and encourage sites to act responsibly with what they manage to get their hands on.

The producers of Stargate have taken the latter approach, and we are grateful for it. They have been hands-off on the spoiler issue, but from time to time they do express their disappointment in that they think we have gone too far. Such happened this week, both privately and publicly, following our report on the previously very mysterious episode "This Mortal Coil." And so I'd like to address this particular report as a test case for the larger issue.

There are three reasons this spoiler report appeared, and included a number of key plot points -- including the fact that the team was really duplicates created by the Replicators. First, several elements had already gone public elsewhere, but no one had collected them all into a single accounting. SCI FI's promo for "This Mortal Coil" revealed that the team encounters doubles of themselves; that the Replicators find and destroy the city; and that Elizabeth Weir returns and contacts Atlantis. The online video revealed even more, with the accompanying logline: "Replicator doubles of the Atlantis team offer to help defend the city from the Wraith."

Other video previews previously published at MGM's official Stargate Web site show key scenes such as Sheppard cutting McKay's hand (apparently to test him), and Sheppard and Weir fleeing through the forest from an attack.

Second, we felt justified in publishing the report because astute GateWorld Forum members had also been given a few additional spoilers, publicly posted by a fan with some kind of inside access (including some of Repli-Keller's statements about the duplicates' true nature, and the fate of the real Weir). In the course of the discussion they managed to put together what the episode was really about, what the cutting of McKay's hand was all about, etc. , with impressive accuracy. GateWorld's spoiler report added some details to put these pieces in order and make some sense out of them, and confirmed that our forum members had done an accurate job making sense out of all the teaser material available -- most of which, mind you, came from SCI FI and MGM.

Third, and finally, we published the report because spoilers are a part of the news coverage that GateWorld does (and we did it in keeping with our own restrictive spoiler policy). We got some great insider info from a legitimate source (not a leak inside the studio who was doing something he shouldn't have), and as a fan site and a news site we wanted to share it -- in a way that would make people even more eager to watch the episode. In writing the report I tightened the spoiler reigns even further, revealing only the contents of the teaser, the first act, and some key exposition from Repli-Keller at the beginning of Act 2. The report covered less than an act and a half, and nothing beyond about the first third of the episode.

SCI FI's promo, on the other hand, revealed key plot twists and scenes from Acts 2, 3, and 4.


Spoilers exist. It may sound like passing the buck, but it's the reality of the world that sites like GateWorld play in. The producers, the studio, the network, their respective Web sites and promotional arms all exist within a controllable "chain of command" -- but fan sites are "civilians" outside the chain, who cannot be controlled. Unless we are ready to swear off all spoilers in all forms entirely -- including the plot info that comes from the network and the studios themselves -- we have to find a way to publish them responsibly.

I realize that this is a long post, and that it comes across as defensiveness over something that I don't really feel the need to defend. The spoiler report on "This Mortal Coil" did not differ from the dozens that we publish each year during the regular filming months. But what I would like this post to do, instead, is to generate some discussion. I would like to hear from other fans, from GateWorld readers, from other fan site owners and writers, and from interested people at MGM, SCI FI, and Stargate Productions.

Wishing that spoilers did not exist is unrealistic. Studios can't wish away spoilers any more than they can wish away DVR time-shifting and the WGA strike. But what should we do with the info that we receive? How much is too much, and how far is too far? How can a fan site handle spoilers in a responsible way, a way that respects the show and helps to promote it? Does the site need to worry about keeping up with its own competition among other fan sites and publishers? And what is the proper response when a source that is "within the chain of command," such as the network itself, spoils even more than the fan sites?

These are important questions. Even if there are no Internet-changing conclusions reached, I hope that we can talk about them. The fact that we as fans want to talk about them is, I think, itself a sign of respect.

We have some interesting discussion threads going at GateWorld Forum over the ratings numbers for Stargate Atlantis's fourth season. Is the show holding its own? Doing well? Falling into the abyss? Are its ratings only down because more people are time shifting with DVR technology, or are fewer people actually watching this year?

Ironically, since SCI FI Channel rarely (if ever) publishes ratings numbers that include DVR-delayed viewing (Nielsen tracks viewings up to a week after the original broadcast), fans of shows like Stargate may never be able to really answer many of these questions.

What is difficult for us fans to get our brains around, after being told for decades how important ratings are and how a show will live or die by how the numbers are crunched by studios, networks, and advertising executives, is that ratings no longer reflect viewership or popularity.

Those numbers are still important, and they still exist to help networks and advertisers figure out how much 30 seconds of air time ought to cost. But they no longer reflect (with any helpful level of precision, at any rate) how popular a series is.

Maybe a little less speculation is called for as a result. As engaged fans of the show we don't have all the information, and we don't know how many people really watch Atlantis -- especially when one factors in legal and illegal online viewing, and the show's broad international audience. What we do know is that, as low as the published ratings are, it's still the top-rated original drama on SCI FI. And it has been renewed for another season!

Blogs are the author's personal space and represent solely the views of the author, and not necessary those of GateWorld.net and its owner. Entries are not edited or reviewed by GateWorld before publication.