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CBS All Access doesn't measure ratings, as they're pretty pointless (as they are, to a certain extent, for all streaming shows). What matters is engagement and subscriptions: does a show starting or coming back for more seasons drive more subscriptions? The answer with CBS-AA is that it does.
The target for CBS when it launched All Access in 2017 was to reach 8 million subscribers by the middle of 2021. It instead achieved that goal in February 2019. The subscription base then more than doubled in the next two years, reaching 17 million in December 2020. Or, to put it another way, CBS All Access has twice the subscription figures it planned to have by now, making it an unqualified success.
These numbers are small fry compared to Disney+, Amazon or Netflix, but CBS All Access is a US-only service offering a comparatively limited slate. Having more than a tenth of Netflix's figures when it has access to significantly less than one-tenth of Netflix's potential customer base is quite an achievement.
The primary driver of this success is STAR TREK. CBS All Access has a number of other original offerings, some pretty good for what they are (THE GOOD FIGHT, ONE DOLLAR, THE STAND, TELL ME A STORY) but they're not getting people to sign up in large numbers. The STAR TREK catalogue is what's getting people to sign up, and in particular the new shows are driving subscription boosts. Pleasingly, for CBS-AA, they are not getting lots of subscription drop-offs when seasons end. People stick around to watch more stuff with them, which given that they do not have anything like the catalogue of Netflix or Amazon is quite remarkable.
There are also no credible reports anywhere of DISCOVERY losing viewers. Given there are literally more than fifteen times as many people watching CBS All Access now than there were in 2017 and DISCOVERY is its flagship show, that's a rather ludicrous claim. The only such reports are coming from dubious YouTube channels and alt-right/Gamergate-aligned websites rather piteously desperate to claim the show is doing poorly and is about to get cancelled, something they have been doing consistently with all three seasons of the show and both PICARD and LOWER DECKS, and becomes all the more feeble the more STAR TREK shows that are commissioned and the more money that is spent on them.
This isn't even mentioning the fact that DISCOVERY gets solid (though not spectacular) international numbers for Netflix, and Amazon did very well with PICARD. Amazon is dropping LOWER DECKS internationally tomorrow after a lengthy fan campaign from international TREK fans to get them to pick up the show, which is not the actions of a disengaged or uninterested fanbase.
To date, CBS-AA has spent $364 million (that's more than was spent on all seven seasons of VOYAGER, for comparative purposes) producing four seasons of live-action TREK and are spending comparable amounts in the coming years on additional seasons of DISCOVERY, PICARD (both shooting), SECTION 31, STRANGE NEW WORLDS (both in pre-production), LOWER DECKS and PRODIGY. They are not a charity. They are not spending that kind of money to stick it to haters or anything like that. If the new TREK shows were losing money, they would cancel them, end of story.
And I say that as someone who has had big problems with the direction CBS STAR TREK has been going in (apart from LOWER DECKS, which was excellent), and thinks Alex Kurtzman should be fired immediately and replaced with someone with even the vaguest knowledge of what STAR TREK is and could be (TNG writer Naren Shankar, who has been absolutely killing it as the showrunner of THE EXPANSE, is available next year, just saying).
Suggesting that the new STAR TREK shows have been anything other than a massive commercial success is simply not being congruent with reality.
I suggested that if season 4 drops off in quality as much as season 3 did from seasons 1 and 2, then Discovery will be in trouble.
DISCOVERY Season 4 could consist of 12 episodes that are fifty times worse than "Spock's Brain" and "Threshold" combined and get -50% on Rotten Tomatoes. As long as the show continues to pull in masses of new subscribers for CBS All Access (or Paramount+ as they're apparently going to rebrand it next year), that would be irrelevant. The show's not going anywhere.
Looks like a falling off of both quality and quantity viewership to me.
Rotten Tomatoes measures critical and audience opinions (or organised hate-driven pile-ons) and creates an aggregate score based on those opinions. It does not measure viewership ratings. You seem to have the two technical terms confused.
The viewership of DISCOVERY has grown season-on-season substantially, propelling CBS All Access to over twice their anticipated viewer share and more than twice their anticipated income by this time period. That is the simple fact of the matter. The show and all the others will continue as long as they keep doing that, regardless of review scores, opinions and whatever screeching nitwittery random YouTubers continue to voice.
In a world where actual viewership is entirely guesswork because CBS All Access doesn't publicly provide that information
They don't provide viewership-per-show or episode because it's pointless, that isn't where they make their money. They have, however, publicly revealed their viewership growth year on year for the past few years, confirming that had 8 million subscribers in mid-2018 and 17 million last month, which they seem to be attributing to STAR TREK, both the performance of the new shows and the legacy performance of the older shows.
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So the press release (read: propaganda) for CBS Access is purposely obfuscating the information because that's what press releases are for - to make the object look shiny.
If CBS All Access had been failure, they would have shut it down and sold their library back to Netflix (or maybe tried to get Amazon or Apple to bid on it).
CBS and Paramount, now they're back together, are not charities and are not going to be spending the better part of $90 million per season on keeping a failing show in the air.
So whilst I have no doubt they will spin their figures to look as good as possible, there is also a limit on what they can do with that. They can't make a failing service look great and they can't flat-out lie about subscription numbers. Since things like share prices ride on that, lying about such things is fraud and executives could go to jail for trying that.
The fact is the new Coronavirus has made streaming services grow across the board, and so is a big part of the "why?" streaming is so popular. What happens when peeps need not be stuck at home and bored?
Coronavirus began in 2017? Fascinating.
"If season 4 rates like season 3 that'll be the end of the series." How is that controversial? How would another 50%+- fall off of relative interest not get the show dropped? I guess if the virus doesn't get knocked out by the vaccines, then there's that but I'm optimistically assuming the vaccine will be effective.
Because - and I'm not sure what about this is difficult to understand - audience scores and opinion ratings on platforms such as IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes are meaningless. They literally do not matter one drop to executives, and you can thank the endless review-bombing of every other show by racist and sexist morons obfuscating real and genuine criticism for that. At least back in the day execs might go, "Well, we've still got the viewers but the reviews are terrible, let's look into fixing that," (which was the case on TNG) whilst now it's, "meh, it's butthurt incels because we put a woman in charge, ignore them."
You're basically asking why a boy band whose latest album sold 17 million copies hasn't been dropped by their record label because it got rubbish reviews in the press and was review-bombed on commercial sites? Or why hasn't Sony shut down Naughty Dog because Last of Us 2 got a 5.7 user score on Metacritic after selling 10 million copies? It is irrelevant. Commercial success is the only thing that matters.
You yourself stated:
"Given there are literally more than fifteen times as many people watching CBS All Access now than there were in 2017."If that were the case then why do the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes become demonstrably worse?
It sure looks like a falling off of both quality and quantity viewership to me - 8,722 --> 549.
Season 2 of STAR TREK: DISCOVERY has been available to watch for just under two years. Season 3 of STAR TREK: DISCOVERY has been available to watch for just under two weeks. I mean, I'm not even sure you're making a serious point here because there's a pretty obvious gap in time here.
All trends consistent with each other and the other measures to be found outside of a nielsen rating.
All review trends that are completely meaningless and have no bearing on the decision to renew the show or not.
Most shows get a ton of critical interest in their first season and then less critical interest in successive seasons. That's not unusual, unless it's a mega-hit like GAME OF THRONES or THE MANDALORIAN. It's one of the reasons the new paradigm is creating a number of interconnected shows set in the same universe, so you have multiple "Season 1s" to garner interest (PICARD S1 had more interest than later seasons of DISCOVERY, and I have little doubt that Season 1 of STRANGE NEW WORLDS will have more interest than later seasons of DISCOVERY or PICARD).
Those are some good points. We can test those points once (if?) an effective Coronavirus vaccine gets fully distributed. When online is the only game in town it's gonna be really hard not to rise with the tide.
Wouldn't viewership rising with the tide due to an increase in streaming because of the pandemic be a direct refutation of your prior argument that viewership and interest is down?
Are we not seeing a similar effect here?
$236M is an enormous chunk of change for the TTRPG market and I'll guess that those numbers go down considerably the year after effective vaccinations become widespread.
The streaming increase is due to people seeking out new forms of entertainment to engage in while staying at home, the other is that tabletop players are taking more chances on independent games that need kickstarting. It could be the same effect of an entertainment starved audience seeking out alternate sources of content; or it could be that the same pool of people who often kickstart games have had more disposable income because they are going out less; or it could be that there are more kickstarted game products because independent creators have had more time to work on their products and get them out there.
CBS All Access is a package deal - an enormous package of programming. The package is more popular because it's being pushed by the pandemic-induced staying at home with nothing else to do (we know this because all streaming services dramatically increased in popularity over the last year) and CBS All Access got a boost from the recent merger with Nick.
A very good portion of the rise in viewership happened over the first two years of the existence of the platform we know this because we have official statements about specific increases across the two years that existed prior to the pandemic.
The "Merger" with Nickelodeon in February of 2020 that brought on archive content from Nickelodeon and has as yet produced no new content has brought in a significant number of new registrants? I'd love to read the article you found this claim in.
ST-D is not parsed out as a separate portion of CBS All Access so from the official numbers we can't tell anything about ST-D after its launch in 2017.
You keep referring to "official numbers" as if there are official released numbers to draw from. Once more, there aren't. There are platform registration numbers, which say nothing of viewership.
Sources elsewhere on the Internet all show a decreasing trend in interest for ST-D.
No, you have interpolated a decrease in interest into your interpretation of a decrease in reviews. You've shown no evidence of a connection between the two.
I think that decrease is a result of the show quality dropping, even Wert agrees with the drop in quality, and there is nothing else that says different than that.
Wert spoke of not being a fan of the particular content, he did not "agree with the drop in quality" and saying that you think that the decrease in viewership that you think is proven by the reduction of reviews online is due to the decrease in quality that you think occurred is just proof that you're discussing your opinion. Which is a thing you claimed you do not do.
I'm talking about ratings not opinions.
Your claim here is that because of the pandemic more people are watching CBS All Access because it suits your argument to credit all viewership increase to the pandemic, yet paradoxically less people are watching Disco because it suits your argument to claim that Disco is on some form of cancellation bubble. So what then are these pandemic viewers watching - The Good Fight?
Are you able to prove any of your claims or is all you have that less people reviewed the show in its third season?
CBS All Access is a package deal - an enormous package of programming. The package is more popular because it's being pushed by the pandemic-induced staying at home with nothing else to do (we know this because all streaming services dramatically increased in popularity over the last year) and CBS All Access got a boost from the recent merger with Nick.
ST-D is not parsed out as a separate portion of CBS All Access so from the official numbers we can't tell anything about ST-D after its launch in 2017. Sources elsewhere on the Internet all show a decreasing trend in interest for ST-D. I think that decrease is a result of the show quality dropping, even Wert agrees with the drop in quality, and there is nothing else that says different than that.
There's sweet FA on CBS All Access compared to Netflix, Amazon and Disney+, though. People are not signing up to watch THE GOOD FIGHT. People might sign up to watch THE STAND and then bail again immediately afterwards, but those figures would not be available yet.
START TREK is by far the prime driver of subscriptions for CBS All Access, it has more content on the service than anything else by far.
I also didn't say the quality had dropped. I think Season 3 was the best season of DISCOVERY to date, which seems a reasonably common response across the board, but it still had a f-ton of problems that it really needs to sort out.
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To me:
"f-ton of problems that it really needs to sort out" = drop in quality.
Sure, if you ignore the first clause of the sentence which was:
I think Season 3 was the best season of DISCOVERY to date, which seems a reasonably common response across the board, but it still had a f-ton of problems that it really needs to sort out.
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As I said before, trying to use the reviewometer sites to gauge popular reaction to DISCOVERY is impossible because they were review-bombed heavily for each season, including the first, by people rabidly enraged that the black woman was the focal character of the series (or they were recasting Spock for Season 2, or they were casting both trans and nonbinary actors in Season 3). Because of that, other, more nuanced criticism has been deafened out of the conversation.
Or to put it another way, the review aggregators are pretty worthless because they've been gamed.
Also, I don't gave a flying toss about an anonymous mass of other people's opinions. I know my opinions and that's what I crank out, rather than reviewing the hype or the lack of hype (something a lot more outlets, even professional ones, could stand to remember right now).
Best live action science fiction story dropped on a streaming service in months.
I'll have to take your word for it, since Paramount terminated their licence agreement with Netflix outside the USA 48 hours before the new season dropped. Reportedly we have to wait until early-to-mid 2022 when Paramount+ launches in the UK as an add-on to our most expensive streaming service.
So, that's annoying.
Sorry that happened Wert. Honestly it feels like the streaming wars have just begun.
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QB, advocating for piracy as a valid alternative is probably not a good stand to take on the forums of a company that creates and sells content.
Sig line seen on another forum: "Don't worry about TV. You aren't missing anything."
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Sort-of good news. Paramount have restored DISCOVERY for international viewers, but only the ad-driven PlutoTV service.
Disco doesn’t have any cannon’s, but what Canon are you claiming they violated?
Also based on your posted responses to previous seasons, it isn’t clear they had you as a fan before this episode aired.
So a Star Fleet officer gets stabbed in the gut and just dies, yet Gray Tal gets a brand new (synthetic) body and, despite this being a "never been done before" attempt, works like a charm.
Not at all how it was presented. It was referenced by Culber as having been attempted several times since the late 24th century when it was first successfully done for an Admiral by the name of Picard.
[QUOTE* Actually both Cpt. Burnham and Lt. Silly laugh. Because of course the senior officer would find the whole thing funny too.
Starfleet officers laughing together after the end of a traumatic event that resulted in the death of a character we'd never seen before is a tradition that goes back to 1966 - hard to say it is somehow antithetical to Star Trek after all this time.
