Maybe The Move to Streaming Wasn’t the Best Thing for Star Trek, After All
Forget "Peak Trek," today it's about "shrinkflation" of the franchise
As much as we might hate to admit it, Star Trek’s been about selling the public on something new from the very beginning.
Those brightly colored uniforms from original Star Trek that today look like pajamas?
The series ran on the NBC network, which was owned in those days by RCA.
RCA made color television sets, and its executives wanted the original series to feature those bright uniforms to try to compel viewers to buy more color TVs.
So it shouldn't be surprised when a half-century later, the network which ultimately acquired Star Trek — CBS — made a very similar decision.
It was with great fanfare — and even greater expectations — that corporate executives chose to make new Star Trek available exclusively on their new subscription-based streaming service at the time when they made the big announcement that the franchise would finally be returning to television after a 12-year absence with the launch of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017.
In fact, they were absolutely counting on Star Trek fans to carry the success of their streaming service, which began as CBS All Access before being rebranded as Paramount Plus.
“All Access will put out original content and knowing the loyalty of Star Trek fans, this will boost it,” said Les Moonves, then the boss at CBS Corp, when the news first broke back in 2015. “ … There’s about a billion channels out there and because of Star Trek, people will know what All Access is about.”
Moonves almost made it sound as if the success of the streaming service was riding nearly entirely with us fans, and we fans would be meticulously catered to.
It didn't quite work out that way.
Other than an ability to drop the occasional “F bomb,” where has this brave new move to streaming gotten Star Trek?
Highly abbreviated seasons — often as few as just 10 episodes at a time — and a large reliance (over-reliance??) on serialized storytelling.
And it’s not even paid off from a business sense.
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Paramount, we all know, today is struggling financially as a company, mightily.
But more than that, streaming specifically never took off in the way it wanted.
The cable and network television unit accounts for about 67 percent of Paramount’s top line while streaming now makes up roughly 24 percent of its business, according to one recent analysis.
That’s relegated Star Trek from the largest segment of Paramount’s business, to what amounts to a backwater.
So much for being Paramount’s “crown jewel.”
The indignity for fandom doesn't end there.
Paramount Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra recently spoke at a conference in San Francisco, and the news wasn’t good.
Chopra told the gathering of investors that Paramount intends to “extract as much value as we possibly can.”
“It’s all about the right volume and the right cadence of original content, which you then use to drive consumers into library and affinity programming, which tends to be significantly less expensive and therefore more efficient,” he said. “We really want every single one of our customers to believe that there are, call it one or two, new originals available on the service that are relevant to them at any given point in time.”
Gone are the days when executives promised us “there should be a Star Trek something on all the time” on the service.
Admittedly, often you need to have the most finely tuned universal translator to understand corporate-speak.
But when Chopra talks about driving “consumers into library and affinity programming,” that sounds like Paramount intends to offer very little in the way of new Star Trek and rather prefer fans subsist on endless reruns of the series that already exist.
That’s a far cry from the days just a couple of years ago when we had three, four — or even more — new seasons to look forward to every year and folks excitedly talked about reaching “Peak Trek.”
It's frankly discouraging to think that we’ll actually have less to be excited about for the franchise in the next few years than we’ve enjoyed over the last few.
But unless something changes, here we are.
Certainly every consumer is different, and they’ll make their own decisions about their spending on streaming.
But the choice of less new content at a time of rising subscription rates seems like Star Trek’s own brand of that pernicious “shrinkflation” we’ve all been hearing about.
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