As has been the trend, beyond just cancelling shows , streaming services have been completely removing them from their catalog (presumably for tax purposes). Star Trek Prodigy is the latest victim which is a shame. The show started off slow but became basically a sequel to Star Trek Voyager. I was looking forward to seeing where season two went.
Apparently they plan to finish making Season two and shop it somewhere else, so that’s something.
Seems unlikely.
The Batgirl show was cancelled before its release, most outsiders believe this was so WB could claim it as a complete short-term loss. For a show like Prodigy which was actually completed and delivered, you can’t really call it a loss in the same way. I don’t know precisely how they recognize revenue for individual shows on streaming services, but this show had a return. Keeping it on the service to get a few streams later is not going to materially affect the profit/loss of the service and will not impact their tax statements.
Prodigy was more likely pulled due to some royalty or licensing agreement. It might also allow them to massage the earnings report numbers by shuffling these shows into a separate bucket. It’s definitely about cutting costs and looking better for investors, but not as a tax write off.
The explanation I’ve heard about pulling shows off quickly is that royalties are highest in the first year or two so you can save the most money if you remove the show from the streaming service immediately.
The lesson from this is if that there is a streaming-only show you like always pirate it. It is the only guarantee that you can watch it later.
Or buy your own copy. Prodigy’s been released on dvd and bluray. A streaming service can never take those copies away from you or re-edit them.
You couldn’t even read the full sentence you replied to? I said “streaming-only”. Which means a show with no other source, including DVD. Prodigy happens to not fit that definition (which I wasn’t aware of) but there are other disappeared shows that do.
The better word here, I think, is “residuals,” ongoing payments to talent. Royalties are payments for the use of intellectual property, like a TV series paying the owner of a song played under the credits.
Most of the “streaming service removes its own self-produced show from live library” thing that’s been happening lately is so the parent studio doesn’t have to keep writing these residuals checks to the actors etc. every time a subscriber clicks Play.
Yes, residuals is the right term.
I had the vague idea that they had to pay residuals on streaming shows even if they don’t get any “clicks”, but I could be wrong on that.
FWIW how to account for residuals in a streaming world is among the issues that are major in the writers’ strike.
This is modestly sad news. It was a very good show and I would definitely have watched a season two. But at least it didn’t end with too many major unanswered questions (just a few to hint at next plots) and it is not among the few shows that I’d consider watching again.
Out of curiosity, how often do you all rewatch shows? I can’t say I’ve ever bought a bunch of episodes of a show and just periodically rewatched them in order.
I did read the full sentence. And I assumed that when you referring to “streaming-only shows” in a thread about Prodigy, you had the mistaken belief that Prodigy was a streaming-only show.
It’s all of the above:
Occasionally. There are a number of shows that I’ve rewatched as a whole more than once. The biggest rewatch being all of Buffy + Angel every few years (254 episodes). I recently finished a rewatch of NewsRadio (only 97 episodes).
Prodigy isn’t the only show cancelled in this round, and not the only round of cancelling.
The point I was making is that if you don’t have an undeletable local copy of x, then you do not have x. Never trust streaming/cloud storage as your only source.
Turns out we were both half right. Only the first 10 episodes of season 1 are on DVD, so half of it is streaming-only.
For current shows when I had more free time I would often rewatch a season when a new season was about to start. These days I will often watch the previous finale before the new season.
But for shows I enjoy or just want to see again, I always have a series “in rotation” to just play while eating or relax before going to sleep. In the last year or so Scrubs led into New Girl which led into Frasier which led into Modern Family. We also rewatch dramas as well and recently rewatched Battlestar Galactica and are currently on The Americans (both were rewatches for me but new to my wife).
Fair enough. I haven’t watched Prodigy. The only recent Star Trek series I’ve watched is Lower Decks, the other current animated series, and that has ten episode seasons.
I’ve rewatched a small amount of shows, but not as many as I had expected, judging from the DVD sets I have that I’ve never looked at a second time. But right now, TV is in a fallow period (which will be extended while the writer’s strike continues) so I am revisiting some older shows, from five or ten years or more back, that I have largely forgotten, but remember as being particular highlights at release time. I can see Star Trek Prodigy (and Lower Decks) fitting in to that someday, but not until 2027 or so.
Moderating:
I’d like to remind you, and all the other posters, that the SDMB supports copyrights and forbids recommendations to break the law, especially copyright law.