[Ragnarok]

I'm not a fan of your switch to a for profit venture, RagnaroktA. That was never the spirit of my original slides, nor in keeping with the spirit of XBMC or Cinema Experience itself.

I can appreciate the desire to get something from the work you've put into this, but requesting "donations" and locking down your website to only those who donate is disingenuous at best, and bordering on criminal at worst, considering the majority of the design (my template that borrowed liberally from NTN) and content (AMC's online movie trivia) has been re-purposed from others.

This is reminiscent of "Steven Good", who pays no royalties to The Coca-Cola Company, but has the audacity to charge people for slides based around their logo and brand recognition.

This isn't what's best for the community.

I've been trying to keep this quiet, but I'd like to quell the negativity here. The switch to 'for profit' was made a bit prematurely so that myself and Kevin (creator of HT SlideVision) could fund a joint project. For the past week I've been working on creating a single website where all of our content can live, and be easily obtained by any Home Theater community. I needed to raise some money to pay for the domain, hosting, etc. We're still working out the details. While there will probably be some kind of subscription based donation in there somehow, it will just be to pay for the storage and central website. The content will largely be free, with the possible exception of the video content, animated slide content and any service we plan to offer through the website such as physical DVD media of slideshows for those people who do not have an XBMC HTPC with Cinema Experience.

It's never been about a desire to get something from the work I've put into creating all of the content. Personally, I'm running very low on free space on my Google Drive. Since I don't want to be out of pocket on the cost for storage (the wife would probably murder me) for all of the current and future content, there will always come a point when I have to force some donations. I'm trying to avoid that as much as possible. I know that Kevin pays for 35 gigabytes of storage out of pocket. I'm trying to help him get his costs down as well.

We've kicked around the idea of hosting content for other developers as well, but for now it will just be a combined effort of myself and Kevin creating new content for the community. Be assured that any donations that go to the new project will be split between all of those who contribute something to the project, including the XBMC team. That's something I'm not currently doing when I get a donation. I just found out you could do that a week ago, and I can't do that on a Google Site because there's no support for the API.

I wholly disagree that this is not what is best for the community, but I can't fault you for your point of view because frankly - you didn't know what the plan was. I think one website where you can get anything you want for Cinema Experience is exactly what we need to do. We need to encourage developers to come together and create content, and get visibility. I think bringing together the two largest slide projects on the internet is a good start.