Yo Ho me maties… they wanna play this game, I’m game to play.
This is such a uniquely bizarre bummer. WHY would they remove the show from the platform? I seriously don’t understand that at all. Cancelling it, while a terrible move, at least has some potentially extant reasons - but it’s literally a new Star Trek show and they’re removing it from Star Trek’s home? I seriously don’t get it!
It’s the new game all the studios are playing where they remove content they don’t deem popular enough to avoid paying any residuals. Zaslav started it with (HBO) Max and now Disney and the others are all following suit.
That’s the thing about residuals though. If it’s not popular enough you don’t have to pay anything. Unless it’s a tax thing I can’t see a downside to leaving it available.
This article and other discussions I’ve seen about this content removal trend seems to put the blame mostly on a tax loophole. I don’t really understand it, but what I think is basically happening is the company does a calculation that the show/movie will make them basically no money but taking a loss on it by trashing it will earn them a larger discount on their taxes.
They think that whole “home of Star Trek” was marketing fluff, but I took it as a promise.
I see that many people are really angry.
Some say on other social media that they are canceling their Paramount+ subscriptions. The petition has surpassed 15k in under 3 days.
I suspect this may become one of those marketing disaster case studies for business schools. SNW just streamed one of the best-ever episodes in the franchise ‘Ad Aspera Per Aspera’ but the runaway trending conversations are about Prodigy and how the show won’t be there when people planned to watch it.
Our household’s newly-ordered BlueRay set for episodes 1-10 just arrived. (I’m hoping 11-20 will be produced as announced, and as the EPs have said is still going forward, but I’m reluctant to count on that.)
I’m not sure exactly how the revenue and expenses work out for US tax purposes, but one can only hope that all the online purchases, downloads and merchandise orders in the past few days will diminish the value of Paramount’s tax write-off while increasing residuals owed to the creators.
It baffles me to no end that a company will pull their own IP from their servers. It costs them next to nothing to leave that up for stream. That was the whole premise of streaming in the first place!
Right? Streaming services need to remember that they’re competing against piracy. For several years, I would say they were winning. Then they started to pull their IP back to their own platforms and Balkanize into what amounts to a cable package 2.0
I’m more than happy to pay for my content so that the creators and staff get paid for their work, but there’s only so much BS I’m willing to put up with before I dust off the old torrent client and try to remember how to sail the high seas. Pulling content like this is one such form of BS.
I’m still waiting for it all to come full circle and have some company offer a bundle deal for a bunch of different streaming platforms that aren’t already under the same roof. Amazon Prime is closest to that model already since you can add other streamers individually for additional fees.
Yeah, shit like this is why I hate streaming.
On the bright side, the news about Prodigy being pulled is why I started watching it today. Seems pretty fun so far!
They pay residuals to the creators per viewing so not giving anyone the option to stream it is the cheapest option. Netflix doesn’t ask you if you’re still watching because they’re trying to save you electricity or not run up your monthly data cap.
Only proportional to the viewership. Which is their product. So removing their product removes cost? If course, but it also removes business.
You want to minimize cost without hurting your sales. In the case of subscription there’s a strong indirect link between viewership and sales. A consumer doesn’t want to pay a subscription for something they don’t use.
This is clearly a move by the soulless minions of orthodoxy.
