D&D Movie/TV Dungeons & Dragons Adventures is a 24-Hour Streaming Channel Launching in Summer

This summer, a new free streaming channel will be launched by eOne, the entertainment company owned by Hasbro. It will be ad-supported and available on multiple (as yet unspecified) platforms and feature a mix of animation, third party influencers, and actual play shows.

The old 1980s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon will be available, along with shows like:

• Encounter Party is based on an existing podcast and set in the Forgotten Realms.
• Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! is a comedy game stream in each episode of which a party of 1st level characters march to their deaths against deadly monsters.
• Heroes's Feast is a cooking/talk show.

 

[beta-ray]

Did they say where they would be showing the Manganiello documentary?

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

We can agree the production should be mainly for D&D fandom, but also there should be space for no-fandom, for example cartoons for children.

Maybe they could create a totally new e-sport, a multiplayer with different team roles, and mixing different genres. A player in the team would be the DM, playing as if it was a economic strategy city-building videogame, creating a dungeon to be defended and an army. The warlord would be a second player working as if controlling the squads as in a RTS. The rest of the team would be style arcade, trying to stop enemy army and enemy players.

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Any review of 3PP's titles published in the future D&D-Beyond? Of course, it would be selfpromotion.

* Why not documentaries about History and Myth&Legends? Not only Western History. D&D has drank History as source of inspiration.

* Cartoon comedy. Jem and the hologlyphs. A band of female gnome bards and masters of illusory magic.

A cartoon about a group of cute centaur-kin, ha'ponies and gnoats (halfling-ponies and gnome-goats) studing magic in Stryxhaven. It would be like mixing my little pony with Harry Potter, litle witch academy and the worst witch.

* Tales of the chronomancer. Stories set in alternate continuities, even in no-D&D multiverse (Gamma World, for example).

* Dragoncrest. Set in the demiplane of desolation. A mixture of Mad Max and Conan the barbarian.

* Thorncrown: "The game of thrones is for children when a prince can kill a dragon or a giant with his own magic". A princess notices the fae court is not a group of cute girls singing "Let it go".

 

[Parmandur]

Agreed. But will they allow content that is critical of their products on other platforms? Will they allow streamers to put their content on the platform they choose? This is stuff I need to know before I can celebrate this announcement with the rest of you.

They can't stop people on other platforms, and this has nothing to do with a pure hypotehtical.

 

[Parmandur]

As a rule of thumb yes, but not all of them.

For example.

View attachment 284821

Fair point, thst does show that more people have tried watching Critical Role than bought Honor Among Thieves tickets in the U.S. (though some non-Muricans have bought Honor Among Thieves tickets, some people have gone more than once, etc.). The numbers I looked at for Twitch suggested are probably an aggregate, but a few hundred thousand per episode is nothing to sneeze at given the time investment.

 

[Retreater]

They can't stop people on other platforms, and this has nothing to do with a pure hypotehtical.

Copyright strikes if you use protected names, show art, maybe even game streams, etc. Again, we've seen GW and Nintendo do this.
Imagine if I were to stream my group playing "Curse of Strahd." They could block that for giving out spoilers, or saying that viewers could take the story from what I ran and not have to buy the adventure.
Or what if someone shows some problematic art to criticize a new publication? Would WotC copyright strike that? They could.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

A few games will fill up 24 hours, particularly with reruns.

With your average stream running 2-5 hours, yeah, that will fill a lot.

I'd be happy to set up a webcam of the shelf where my painted minis are drying, if Hasbro wanted to point a money hose at me.

Sounds like something Andy Warhol would make!

I would guess that they're going to buy up the back catalog of some actual play content and run a lot of reruns of the cartoon. If they somehow have the rights to the 2000 movie, I'd expect that to be on overnight every night.

If they get the 2000 D&D movie for streaming, will we start to see "In Praise of the Original D&D Movie" op eds?

 

[mach1.9pants]

Would also love a show about OTHER editions of D&D, but I doubt that's going to happen. Probably can't find a young attractive streamer to talk about 2E.

Hey, I could do it.

Oh I don't qualify, though I might have once

 

[Abstruse]

Copyright strikes if you use protected names, show art, maybe even game streams, etc. Again, we've seen GW and Nintendo do this.
Imagine if I were to stream my group playing "Curse of Strahd." They could block that for giving out spoilers, or saying that viewers could take the story from what I ran and not have to buy the adventure.

This is highly unlikely to happen because it would open the pandora's box that the entire industry wants to ignore:

There is no legal precedent for the legality of live-streaming games.

No company - not even Nintendo with all the crap it pulls or Atlus who threatened streamers with legal action over Persona 5 and other games - has gone beyond filing copyright claims and DMCA takedowns to YouTube and other hosting services to take advantage of the automated systems. No lawsuits have ever made it to trial (the closest was when Digital Homicide went after Jim Stephanie Sterling), so there is no legal precedent for whether or not "Playing a video game with (or without) commentary" is covered as a derivative work and/or review/commentary under fair use.

Every video game studio knows this, and every video game studio avoids going to court over it for three big reasons.

1. Streaming and Let's Play videos are free marketing. Even videos that are highly critical of a game drive sales. Even for big-name AAA titles everyone knows, streams and videos still drive sales.
2. Nobody wants the bad press of being known as the studio that killed streaming. Even the largest studio with the best PR firm would get crushed by the backlash against the ripple effects of going to court over streaming. Do you want to be named as the reason that people like Ninja or AuronPlay stop streaming?
3. They don't want a court precedent set because it's a very effective legal threat they could very easily lose as there are multiple avenues of defense against it. And once there is a legal precedent set that streaming a game is legal, they lose a big weapon in their arsenal to act as a threat. It's mutually assured destruction.

Not to mention that Twitch (Amazon) and YouTube (Google) make a lot of money off the back of streamers and let's players that they do not want to lose. Any game studio attempting to challenge the legality of streaming games will end up going directly against those two in a legal fight.

Or what if someone shows some problematic art to criticize a new publication? Would WotC copyright strike that? They could.

They could always try this. Anytime they wanted to. Opening a streaming network doesn't affect this one way or the other. They haven't because either they don't want to or they know they would lose on any appeal because it's straight-up protected fair use. Like there are legal precedents about this where companies tried to use unauthorized use of art to claim copyright infringement to silence critics and went to court over it. And lost.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don't know how much more available the cartoon could be, its available on youtube (not sure of legality, but WotC doesn't bother with having it pulled and its extremely blatant, so easy to have it pulled down if they wanted to)

It's completely pirated on YouTube. Just look at what channels are showing it.

You may be shocked to learn that there are people who'd prefer not to patronize pirates when possible.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The leaked early draft of the OGL sought to forbid D&D content on video - including "pantomimes" (aka TikTok). This is their opportunity to enforce that.

Unless WotC is going to get the First Amendment of the US Constitution repealed, no, it is not.