Netflix which began offering streamed television and movie content way back in 2007 quickly became a market leader thanks to the lack of competition and their already sizeable catalogue of shows and films, a massive part of the appeal was the ability to watch so much content in one place and the service now boasts well over 70 million subscribers. Their success has led to the creation of more competitors wanting to claim their share of the streaming market. Whilst competition is usually a good thing for consumers it is increasingly the case that do get access to all of the television shows and movies that you want you need to subscribe to numerous services.
CBS launched it's CBS All Access subscription service in late 2014. The service currently boasts a catalogue of over 7,500 episodes available, an impressive sounding number but a far cry from the figures boasted by Netflix who have thousands of TV shows and movies at their disposal. With CBS All Access only breaking the 100,000 subscriber barrier as recently as late 2015, CBS still has a long way to go before it can challenge the big players such as Amazon, Hulu and of course Netflix. One way to do that might be to pull it's content from those that are now their competitors, forcing fans to shell out for yet another service if they want to legally and conveniently access their content.
The six Star Trek series (yes The Animated Series counts) have all been available on both Amazon Prime and Netflix although their availability does vary by region but this could change very quickly, CBS are already using Star Trek as a way to promote their CBS All Access platform with the new series being initially exclusive to the service, so it isn't impossible to believe that CBS will seek to lure as many Star Trek fans as it can by making CBS All Access the one stop shop for all Star Trek television shows.
This could represent quite a gamble for CBS, will they bank on fans to subscribe to yet another streaming service to fulfil all of their Trek TV watching needs (the movie rights still belong to Paramount so we are unlikely to see any changes there) and lose out on the revenues gained from selling Star Trek to other distributors or will they play it safe and at worst use the threat of pulling Star Trek as a way to negotiate better terms with Amazon and Netflix? With the increase in popularity of Star Trek thanks to the admittedly polarising reboot movies this could be some shrewd business by CBS or it could go 'Enterprise' on them and never fulfil it's potential and be quickly abandoned.
What do you think? Will CBS take the risk and what does it mean for Star Trek fans? Would you part with more of your gold pressed latinum for another streaming service if it meant being able to watch Star Trek on demand or is this far no further?
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Writer Bio Michael is an Engineering student and writer for UFPlanets.com. He is a veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard and a licensed amateur radio operator (KK6UWI), who resides in Southern California. Christopher is on an ongoing mission to seek out new life in the hopes it is less annoying than most of Earth's population. It isn't going well. |
Written by Chris Halsey and Michael Koger
Edited By Chris Halsey - chris.halsey@ufplanets.com and Stefano Elia - stefano.elia@ufplanets.com