It’s a case of bad news/good news for Battlestar Galactica fans who have been flocking to the Web to watch an unauthorized trailer for the long-in-the-works offshoot Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome over the past 36 hours. After lengthy deliberations, Syfy has decided not to go forward with the project, about the young years of William Adama, as a regular TV series. Blood & Chrome, initially envisioned as a Web series, was greenlighted as a two-hour TV pilot in October 2010. Because of intensive post-production, including special effects, the pilot was not delivered to Syfy until last November. As of January, Syfy president original programming Mark Stern was quoted as saying that he the network brass were “trying to figure out the economics right now” and that he hoped those would be figured out. Now, the network has passed on the project as a regular series but is looking to do it as a digital one, while airing the already produced pilot on the network as a movie. “Though the vision for “Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome” has evolved over the course of the past year, our enthusiasm for this ambitious project has not waned,” Stern said in a statement today. “We are actively pursuing it as was originally intended: a groundbreaking digital series that will launch to audiences beyond the scope of a television screen. The 90-minute pilot movie will air on Syfy in its entirety at a future date.”

Despite the lengthy production and decision-making, the buzz about Blood & Chrome never died among Battlestar fans. It went into overdrive over the past couple of days following a WonderCom panel over the weekend with Kevin Grazier, the scientific adviser for Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica series, where he screened what was described as a trailer for Blood & Chrome. That trailer, to Trent Reznor and Karen O’s cover of “Immigrant Song” for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, found its way to the Web on Monday night and has gone viral — garnering some 100,000 views in 24 hours. The problem was that this was not an official trailer but a demo reel not intended for public consumption and thus not put through the process of clearing music and other rights. It is still unclear how the video made its way to WonderCon, but NBCUniversal today moved swiftly to take down the multiple copies that had popped up on YouTube. Universal Cable Prods, which produces Blood & Chrome, may still shop the project to other networks. Michael Taylor wrote the teleplay from a story by Battlestar Galactica executive producer David Eick, Taylor and Bradley Thompson & David Weddle.