CBS All Access Claims New Subscription Record with Premiere of “Star Trek: Picard”

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Image: CBS All Access



Jean-Luc’s return has gone remarkably well for ViacomCBS’s streaming service. Thanks in large part to last week’s Star Trek: Picard premiere, which brought back the eponymous captain, CBS All Access saw its highest number of sign-ups ever this month, besting the record set last February by Super Bowl LIII.



The Grammy Awards (and an exciting season of football) were also credited for the feat, but most of the attention was on the USS Enterprise crew and its latest adventure. CBS said that Picard earned new records for both total streams (up 115%) and volume of subscribers tuning into an original series (up 180%), which was previously held by Star Trek: Discovery.



“We’ve seen tremendous continued growth in the service, and the new records we’ve experienced due...
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Meh,

They'll have a few fans sign up right off the bat. That subscription count will likely increase as more and more of the episodes become available for instant streaming.

The more savvy consumers will wait until all 10 episodes are up, subscribe, binge them all, and then cancel before the end of the month.

These bumps in subscribers are temporary.

The streaming service providers are of course hoping that they will get year round subscribers out of this, like how cable TV works, but I see that as being highly unlikely unless you have an absolutely MASSSIVE catalog of content people want to see, so that they can turn it on, select a show and watch at random without any planning.

Not even Netflix is fully at that point though, so I don't know how a smaller service like CBS All Access hopes to accomplish this.

Personally I am still unhappy about the fragmentation of the streaming services. I mean, I don't like streaming at all, I'd prefer higherbitrate pre-diwnloaded content, but what I am really getting at is that I want a single source for all of my content, the way Steam used to be for games.

I hate having to deal with different services and add my credit card to different sites, etc. etc.

I just want to sign up for one service and have ALL content available on that one service.

I don't ever want to create a new account, agree to share my data with yet another service or give anyone else.my payment details. Single point of contact for all my media is what I want. Enter title I search box, hit play, watch. This should be all there is to it.

If I have to go hunting and searching for which service has what content, and sign up for it for just that content, I just won't do it. I'll pass.

Sadly, the gaming industry is moving the opposite direction with more and more exclusives, fragmentation and stupidity.

They say the customer is always right, but when it comes to media and games that seems quickly forgotten.
 
Zarathustra said:
They say the customer is always right, but when it comes to media and games that seems quickly forgotten.
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Because license holders want their money and customers don’t want to pay what the license holders demand for a one-stop-shop type of experience.

It’s a ridiculous industry.

Video has always lagged behind music, it won’t be long until a lot of these smaller services condense down and we end up like we do in music: just a couple of larger shops who only stream, but have pretty sizable catalogs.

I also prefer downloads, but you know, “piracy” is the excuse given there....
 
I will say though, only one episode in, Picard is not bad so far...
 
I might watch Picard and that other Star Trek show... whatever it was called. And I'll do it exactly as described above.

Or I might find a good ripping tool, and just queue it up on my PC and let it rip down all the content I want to watch, then watch it on my PC as the mood takes me. Because why the hell not? I can just queue up 2 days of downloads and get everything I needed.
 
For me the only interest in CBS AA is Star Trek. Discovery hasn't been enough to get me to pull the trigger, even for trial period. Perhaps Picard will.
 
Brian_B said:
I will say though, only one episode in, Picard is not bad so far...
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Yeah, It's not bad. I wouldn't call it great either. I wonder if it feels better just because we haven't seen anything really good in a while.

Mostly Echoing Dan's breakdown on the Hardforums, some examples of stuff that is just off or weird or just not right are as follows:

1.) Star trek technology was always made up, but it used to at least follow some sort of reason, and be more believable. Recreating an entire android from a single "neuron" bit was just kind of ridiculous.

2.) The premise also does not make sense. The Romulan empire was a huge many solar system empire in previous series, now it has been all but completely destroyed just to one supernova?

3.) Why would a malfunctioning android attack on Mars result in Starfleet abandoning helping the Romulan evacuation?

It goes on and on. Patrick Stewart lends some credit to it, but the writing just does not appear to live up to some of the better Trek around Season 3 - 6 TNG and most of DS9.

It is a Sci-fi series, so of course, lots of things are made up, I feel like I read at some point that the Trek writing staff back in the 80s and 90's had some people with scientific and diplomatic/geopolitical/history backgrounds working with them in order to fact check and make things at least seem plausible. They also had strong showrunners that kept things on topic, and insisted the episodes didn't break too much with Canon. I feel like that depth in the writing is missing both with Discovery and with the little we have seen of Picard thus far.

Don't get me wrong. I'm probably still going to watch it. I like having some Trek to watch again. It's just not coming anywhere close to living up to my best memories of Trek.

That said, it's also not as bad as the worst of Trek. (Certain episodes of Voyager, I'm looking at you) At least we have that.
 
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Maybe the whole abandoning the helping the romulans is because they were looking for a reason NOT to do it?
 
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