It took Paramount long enough, but the Star Trek franchise is finally returning to the place of its birth — television — with a new series. The studio announced today that a new voyage would be launched in January of 2017, with Alex Kurtzman producing. This will not affect the development of the next Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond, which is still scheduled for a Summer 2016 release.
Here’s the twist, however….this new series will be exclusive to a streaming service, and not the kind of streaming service most people already have. While the first episode will be free, the rest of them will be part of CBS All Access, the video-on-demand service from the network that costs $5.99 a month. While that’s on the low end of what streaming channels typically charge, there’s a reason: it only covers the content of one network. (Worse yet, it’s CBS!)
So the six-dollar question is whether the upcoming Star Trek revival will be good enough to make that monthly fee worth it. The second question, worth far more, is if the new series can prove profitable on a brand-new service barely anyone knows about. Earlier this year Yahoo launched its own original content channel, Yahoo Screen, and bought a sixth season of Community to attract attention — then left it there with absolutely no promotion outside of their own website. They lost $42 million.
If you live outside of the United States, you don’t have to worry about this All Access nonsense because the new Star Trek will be “distributed concurrently for television and multiple platforms.”
