Yo Ho me maties… they wanna play this game, I’m game to play.
Third rule of acquisition: Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.
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.
Assuming it’s like the others then I believe they will treat it as an investment loss which allows them to take some percentage of the loss as a tax deduction.
I don’t know how the law works but suspect it makes an eventual return to any form of media unlikely.
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.
This is why we can’t have nice things. Corporations are evil. Goodnight.
No body to incarcerate or soul to damn.
Next year on the streaming platform of your choice: Springtime for Hitler!
Great reference!
Capitalists would kill their grandmothers to avoid paying out ten cents to an actual worker
They think that whole “home of Star Trek” was marketing fluff, but I took it as a promise.
I should have known better, but I did too. Shame on me for thinking Paramount actually cared for Trek passed how much it makes them.
This kind of bullshit is part of why the writers are on strike. The studios barely pay the workers for streamed shows but they’d rather not pay them at all.
From what I’ve heard they can save money on their taxes if they claim the show as a loss, but to do that they need to take it off P+ so there can be no doubt that it isn’t making a profit.
So basically the government is paying them to delete content.
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!
Yo ho yo ho…
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!
Even “as a kids show” it was a joy to watch every week. This is a huge loss. It was a great introduction to Star Trek for kids, and even if they didn’t end up Trekkies, it has a great message. It is also a blast for adults!
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.
I figured it saved them electricity and bandwidth
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.
Hey you leave them out of this…
Shit, they got to Dr. Giger!
Look, they may be shadowy overlords who secretly control the fate of the galaxy, but not even they would stoop to something like this.
In Canada, it remains on Crave, with the added description, “available until July 24.”
It’s worth noting that the other Trek series on Crave have similar tags, saying either July 24 (Short Treks, DS9, TAS, “The Cage,” ) or July 31 (PIC, DSC, LD, TOS, TNG, VOY, ENT).
The only exception is SNW, which does not currently have an “available until” tag.
Edit: I’ve also seen a report that Prodigy is still available on Paramount+ in the UK.
Yeah, it’s available internationally in some iterations of Paramount+ and Sky Showtime, and I guess in places where they had a separate licensing deal.
The rights to Trek in general are an absolute mess. Prodigy’s season one has only been viewable in some territories for a few months. I have no idea how much longer it’ll be available in general, and then there is the fact that Picard, TNG, Voyager, DS9, SNW, Discovery and TOS are spread out over multiple streaming subscriptions in many territories. I travel a bunch, and trying to keep watching from the previous episode on the road is an absolute crapshoot.
I have no idea what the numbers look like for all these sbuscription services these days, but they clearly haven’t figured this stuff out at all. I’ve started buying as much as I can physically and I will start phasing out subscriptions. It no longer makes any sense.
I would say buy it digitally as a sign of support but that could also be seen as supporting this move.
When my subscription is up I think I will cancel p+. Then just buy the few shows I want to watch digitally.