I heard someone theorizing that it’s on the streaming service because it is so expensive and they had reasonable concerns that the ratings wouldn’t be high enough to justify the price. How many CBS viewers who usually watch Blue Bloods and NCIS are going to also watch Star Trek Discovery? It just doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of their lineup. With the show that expensive, they wouldn’t just want decent ratings, they would want really high ratings.
So on a streaming service where ratings don’t apply, there’s less pressure. It does sound like CBS All Access needs to still improve things if they do want people to watch it at all though.
Also, if they put the show on the broadcast network, Netflix isn’t going to be as interested in paying for the international rights, because any show on a broadcast or cable channel can easily be made available for illegal downloading.
Capturing a streaming service isn’t hard either. It’ll be interesting to see how pirated this show becomes. Game of Thrones is massively pirated, but ST: Discovery is on Netflix pretty much everywhere outside the US and Canada (188 countries if the press release is to be believed), and Netflix prices itself to local markets, so…
Indeed. This is why a lot of us argue that DRM on video and music is dumb. As long as I can see it and hear it, I can record what I see and hear. You have to convert it to analog at some point in the chain. And once there’s one digital copy, it can be copied and re-encoded forever. (And having only one copy actually makes it easier to spread.)
I actually downloaded (via that bittorrent everyone pretends is dead) the entire first season of a Netflix original downloaded, because I wanted to watch the show on something that wouldn’t play Netflix. (I don’t feel bad, since I have a Netflix subscription). And I got it within a week of its premier.
Yes, it was Fuller House. The first couple of episodes seemed funny, making fun of themselves. But I got bogged down on one ep as being cringy and never returned.
Have you seen how many Netflix originals are available for unauthorized downloading?
We subscribe to Netflix, but if we didn’t, it would be trivially easy to get the shows. There are illegal copies of shows like House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Narcos, Stranger Things, Grace and Frankie, and a whole bunch of others, all over the place. When a new season of a show is released on Netflix, the full season is usually pirated and available for download in a day; two at most.
Here’s a snapshot from ThePirateBay’s top 100 TV shows at the moment:
Discovery 1 is in 40th with 1013 seeds.
Discovery 2 is in 52th with 842 seeds.
By comparison,
The Orville 4 is in 16th with 1543 seeds.
The Orville 1 is in 17th with 1624 seeds.
The Orville 2 is in 22nd with 1438 seeds.
The Orville 3 is in 23rd with 1425 seeds.
Game of Thrones 7x07 is in 1st place with 6903 seeds.
So not only is Discovery far less popular by that metric than Game of Thrones, it is also less popular than The Orville.
(ETA there are several different resolutions and codecs for each episode of each show available, and it is only chance that there is only one version of each on that list–I’m not going to make any attempt to find all versions of each of those and add them together for a more accurate number.)
More reasons it sucks: according to this Reddit thread, the ads-free option is not actually ads-free, and interrupts the show to advertise other CBS properties.
I think I know why they are keeping their viewer data under wraps. They don’t want to admit this isn’t working. Sure, they have record (free) signups right now, but that’s to be expected. But who is staying? The picture quality is lower, the audio quality is lower, and they’re running commercials when you picked the option to avoid them.
Luckily, I’m not interested in STD enough to even bother torrenting it. (Also, nice to see someone on here acknowledge that they didn’t even actually shut down the Pirate Bay, so claims that torrenting is dead are silly.)
That’s the only way this makes any sense. CBS must know that they’ll get at least enough subscribers to cover the costs of running the service and the rest is free money.
I think CBS has hit the limit of how much they can gouge re-broadcasters for. So many people are cutting the cord that the viewer base just isn’t there any more so their only option is to move to a proprietary service that they can control.
I don’t understand what “cutting the cord” has to do with free OTA broadcasters where you need only put up the rabbit ears. If anything, canceling cable would help them
I could be wrong about this but I thought it would be related to getting paid twice. For cable subscribers, CBS not only gets a rebroadcast fee but they also include those viewers in their shows’ ratings.
If you go OTA, you’re only included in viewership, no rebroadcast fee.
The entire cut the cord model is a fn mess everywhere. People sign up, usually free to start, to watch one show or so, then when that has been watched to discontinue. Paying for a single network does not seem like a option many are willing to make. Paying for a group (such as DirecTV now, etc), a show, or a movie service seems to be what people are willing to buy. As such CBS All Access does not fit in unless it’s for a particular show series such as STD.
That said All Access is a experiment and using STD’s only All Access model as leverage to get people to sign up.
Even when it was, they only had a couple episodes at at time. I can buy the whole season off Amazon Video or iTunes for the price of a couple months of CBS All Access, so I dropped it (CBSAA) ages ago. (I only got it in the first place because of STD, and after the first episode with the amphibian Egyptian Klingons and the magic Vulcans, I gave up on that, too).
I only subscribe to it for 3 months out of the year to watch the live feeds of Big Brother. As soon as it’s over I cancel it. It’s my guilty pleasure in the summertime in addition to Cubs baseball!