The re-merging of Viacom and CBS last year into the latest entertainment megacorp meant that suddenly the new company had more streaming services under its banner than it knew what to do with. Now, it sort of knows: It’s mushing them all together, with CBS All Access—the U.S. home of much of Star Trek’s resurgent televisual future—forming the core.
As reported by Polygon, a recent investor call for the company confirmed plans to essentially snowball CBS All Access into a new, as-yet-unnamed streaming service.
All Access is the current U.S. home of Star Trek properties like Picard and Discovery, as well as presumably upcoming projects like Lower Decks, Michelle Yeoh’s Section 31 spinoff, and at the very least some of the what feels like 70 billion plans for Trek’s future being cooked up at the minute.
The new service will sit alongside the free Pluto TV service and its current premium Showtime Anytime offering in the U.S., promising esoteric and meaningless-to-non-shareholder ideals of being “a broad pay offering” service that will operate as a “House of Brands,” because god, it’s 2020 and this is what these people talk like.
What does that mean for you, the person who just wants to watch some Star Trek or Twilight Zone (or like, I dunno…The Good Fight)?
Well, essentially, the new service will be home to shows like that, as well as offerings from across the entire ViacomCBS slate, including programming from Paramount Pictures (like, say the Star Trek films) and Nickelodeon (like, say, that new Star Trek kids show!), as well as BET, MTV, and Comedy Central. And despite technically being rolled into this “new” service, the updated platform will be formed on the foundation of CBS All Access, which has proved a hit for CBS largely thanks to the new Star Trek shows, so it’s likely that they’re not going anywhere else (within the U.S. at least) any time soon.
No details were offered on what this will mean for current All Access subscribers, or even when such a service could launch (and most importantly, if it would cost any different from All Access’ current $9 a month price tag). But, in this age of monolithic studio entities and walled-garden streaming platforms becoming the new norm, such details are as inevitable as the Borg themselves.