Battlestar spin-off heads online

Battlestar Galactica spin-off Blood & Chrome will air as a series of online webisodes this month ahead of its debut on US cable channel Syfy.

From November 9, Machinima Prime will roll out Blood & Chrome as a series of 10×7′-12′ chapters that will be available exclusively online until February 2013.

They will then be compiled as a two-hour movie for Syfy, before being released on Blu-ray, DVD, VoD, pay-per-view and digital download.

Machinima will continue to air the show until April 2013.

The online launch is part of a three-tiered multiplatform strategy from producer Universal Cable Productions (UCP), which worked alongside the original Battlestar Galactica team, comprising exec producer David Eick and Michael Taylor.

The latter wrote the teleplay from a story by Eick, Bradley Thompson and David Weddle.

Blood & Chrome is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, which first aired in 2004 and is itself a remake of the original 1978 version, and takes place amid the first ‘Cylon war’ as sentient robots rise up against their human creators across the 12 colonial worlds.

NBCUniversal-owned UCP’s other credits include Covert Affairs, Psych, Royal Pains and Suits for USA Network and Alphas, Defiance and Warehouse 13 for Syfy.

Machinima is a male-skewing YouTube channel with more than 2.25 billion video views and more than 210 million viewers every month.