A number of very encouraging details about Star Trek: Discovery have emerged during the Television Critics Association summer press tour. But we also learned something incredibly obnoxious: not only will watching Star Trek: Discovery cost you the $5.99/month subscription fee for the otherwise completely useless CBS All Access streaming service, but each episode will also be larded with 12 minutes of commercials.
The subscription fees and ads will only affect viewers in the United States, with most regions abroad getting Star Trek: Discovery through Netflix streaming. Lucky bastards.
Star Trek: Discovery will premiere on CBS, where the network expects the first episode to draw in 15 million viewers. Subsequent episodes will only be available on CBS All Access, because how the hell else are they going to get people to pay for a repository of Big Bang Theory and Look-It’s-Sherlock-But-Not-The-One-Anybody-Likes reruns?
Should the CBS All Access model prove fruitful, expect more of this horseshit in the future. We had a few glittering years of television largely consolidated to a handful of useful, conglomerated streaming services, but those days are over, my friends. The dark days are here. The ecosystem is atomizing and soon we’ll pay $5.99 here and $5.99 there until we’re paying the same (or more) that we used to pay for premium cable subscriptions. Oh, and there will be as many commercials as there were during Saturday morning cartoons in the 90s.
They’ve clamped down. The monetization will not be denied. Car ads stamping on a human face — forever. Resistance is futile. The future sucks.
Unless it’s the Star Trek future.
For as much as paying money to watch ads makes me want to hurl my TV into some anomalous space void, I’ll pony up for Star Trek: Discovery. CBS, you’ve got me right where you want me.
