Thanks to Ain't It Cool News for originally letting me know about this...

Good news for us Star Trek fans, as well as anyone else looking for cool goofy crap to watch for free online -- the new episode of Star Trek: New Voyages (or simply ST:NV) has finally been finished and uploaded, for all your streaming nerdy pleasures. And what exactly is ST:NV? Well, it's basically fan devotion to a television show, taken a couple of steps beyond what is normally seen; it's an entire new Star Trek series, in fact, made and financed exclusively by fans of the show, under the official approval of Paramount (owners of the franchise) under the promise that the group will not pursue a profit. The brainchild of obsessed fan James Cawley, the process began in the early 2000s when he built a series of exquisite recreations of the original '60s television sets, in an abandoned car dealership in upstate New York using over US$100,000 (50000 pounds, 80000 euros) of his own money; soon, a group of dedicated volunteers found themselves flying into the space on their own dime about once a year, in order to film and cut together a new episode of this show that so many of them wished was still "officially" on the air. And then once the episodes were complete, they would release them for free download at their robust website, which is now handling crowds into the tens of millions each time a new video is done.

And this in fact is probably the most remarkable thing about ST:NV, and why it garners as much press as it does; that all those downloads, all that attention to the highest quality possible, has over the years ended up attracting the attention of Star Trek's actual writers, directors, special-effects creators and more, dozens of whom have now volunteered themselves for recent fan episodes, and have flown themselves in with their own dime as well. This is astounding, I think -- one of the first times ever that a fan creation has drawn in the crew of the actual project these people are fans of in the first place -- and is what has quickly elevated the level of recent episodes to almost that of professional Hollywood episodes themselves. And it helps, of course, that working effects houses have recently gotten into the act too -- for example, some of the computer work done on the latest episode was donated by the current staff of the SciFi Channel's Battlestar Galactica, simply because they're fans of what the New Voyages group is trying to do.

Anyway, there's all kinds of stuff to check out, for those who want to blow an entire day doing so (which you can easily do): there is the newest episode, for example, which actually stars George Takei ("Sulu") from the original show and movies; and there is the electronic magazine the group publishes, also free; and of course there are the three other episodes the ST:NV crew have put together; and then there is the ancillary press the group is receiving, such as this magazine-style piece on CBS' The Early Show. As both an arts administrator and a former artist myself, I am of course always full of glee when I see such involved fans of the arts like this; it's a great success story, I think, and something all of you would probably enjoy checking out.