• Forbes, Tuesday, November 27, 2012 2:45 PM

In April, Comcast's SyFy Channel and Trion Worlds will launch what SyFy's President Dave Howe calls "the holy grail of convergence”: "Defiance," a TV show and a multiplayer online video game. Comcast's "NBC Universal has wanted a piece of the videogame business for a long time," so it will wholly own the TV show, which combined with the game will generate costs of about  $100 million, writes Jeff Bercovici.

"Defiance" will be a high-cost gamble that could pay off big, making profitable a network whose shows “are loss leaders, for the most part, or a break-even proposition,” says Howe.

The show's production is "an order of magnitude larger and more complex than anything Syfy — or any other basic cable channel — has ever attempted, involving scores of actors and writers, dozens of programmers and no fewer than seven alien languages," writes Bercovici.

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