That’s It: Streaming Has Killed Star Trek
The end of “Strange New Worlds” has been announced
It’s pretty official now: Hollywood’s collective — and Paramount’s own — misadventures in streaming has basically killed Star Trek, at least for now.
The producers of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds have announced the official end of the series with a truncated fifth season.
That will leave the yet-to-premiere Star Trek: Starfleet Academy as the only regular series in the franchise in production. (Paramount also has announced Star Trek: Starfleet Scouts, but that will be a series of digital shorts for kids posted straight to YouTube.)
So if Star Trek’s not actually dead, it’s certainly on aggressive life-support and not its future not looking at all secure.
It’s a far cry from what the franchise looked like just two or three years ago, when we had as many as five Star Trek series rolling through Paramount Plus in a given year, often overlapping each other.
Our little Trek cups were indeed runneth over.
Paramount’s deep financial troubles, and its ongoing attempts to merge with another entity like Skydance Media are already well-known.
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What might be less well-known is that Star Trek is a direct casualty of Paramount’s lemmings-like decision — along with the rest of Hollywood — to abandon successful business models and revenue streams in favor of what would become a Kamikaze pursuit of content streaming.
The YouTube channel Midnight’s Edge recently posted an installment focusing on how streaming has killed Hollywood.
The video focuses on Disney and Disney Plus, most specifically. But Paramount and Paramount Plus are no different.
The video, “Hollywood bet the farm on streaming … and LOST!,” is fairly short at just about 13 minutes and I’d encourage you to watch it for yourself:
But to summarize, it’s a story of greed, and how Hollywood studios cannibalized themselves in a vain attempt to all be like Netflix.
“Streaming has been nothing but a self-inflicted disaster for Hollywood for years now,” the video says.
The studios have always chased secondary revenue sources for their releases, but by the early years of this century had found great success selling millions of units of physical media (DVDs, Blu-Ray copies, etc).
Then they got greedy, eying “all of that sweet, sweet cash that Netflix was making,” and decided to go into the business of competing against Netflix with their own libraries of content.
“What happened instead was that they — for all intents and purposes — started a new format war,” the Midnight’s Edge video said. “But rather than between Blu-ray and HD DVD, it was between streamers. In such an environment, no one could be Netflix — not even Netflix.”
The truth is that if wiser, cooler heads had prevailed atop Paramount a decade ago, the studio wouldn’t have followed Disney and its other rivals blindly down the path of streaming perdition.
It could have avoided those mistakes, and instead continued to produce and sell Star Trek (and other projects) to end distributors like TV networks and, yes, Netflix. And make really good money doing it.
But, of course, that’s not what happened, the Star Trek franchise today is one of the biggest casualties in the streaming wars, and we the fans are the ones left to mourn the loss.
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