By making Star Trek exclusive to All Access, CBS shows it is serious about competing with Netflix, Amazon, others with its own streaming service
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2015, CBS made Star Trek an exclusive to its own streaming service, pulling one of television's most valuable franchises off Netflix and Amazon and into All Access. It was an early shot in what would become the defining media battle of the decade: studios keeping their libraries for their own platforms rather than licensing them out.
The bet paid off structurally even before it paid off financially — by early 2020, All Access and Showtime had reached 11 million combined subscribers, and ViacomCBS was already building an expanded ad-supported service on top of that foundation. The move presaged the broader fragmentation wave of 2020, when major studios' exclusivity plays began forcing viewers to subscribe to four or five services.
First-order effects
- Star Trek fans who watched via Netflix or Amazon now had to subscribe to CBS All Access, making it the direct test case for whether franchise loyalty alone could sell a standalone streaming subscription.
- CBS converted a reliable licensing revenue stream from Netflix and Amazon into a customer-acquisition engine for its own platform, trading immediate cash for long-term subscriber ownership.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks took note: NBCUniversal's later announcement of its own ad-supported streaming service followed the same playbook of keeping content in-house rather than licensing it to competitors.
- ViacomCBS doubled down on the strategy, layering advertising onto the original model and eventually rebranding All Access as Paramount+ with a $4.99 Essential Plan, while Pluto TV's fast-growing free tier gave the portfolio additional reach.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, every major studio ends up as a streamer — leaving Paramount as an underdog continuing alone against Netflix and Disney, with industry consolidation pressure building as smaller platforms struggle to match scale.
- Franchise IP becomes the primary currency of streaming competition: the value of a library shifts from what competitors will pay to license it toward what it can retain and acquire subscribers for its owner.
The trend: Studios are progressively withdrawing marquee franchises from third-party platforms to fuel their own streaming services, fragmenting viewing across more subscriptions than audiences will sustainably pay for.