The Best Star Trek Series Is Finally Leaving Netflix
Netflix is losing the best ever Star Trek series at the end of the month, but they are not the only ones to lose some Trek.
For over a decade, Star Trek has found a streaming home on Netflix. Beginning in 2011, the big red giant licensed all available live-action Star Trek series (which at the time was The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise), which no doubt was a small but essential part of their early dominance of the streaming market. However, things are a lot different in 2022; pretty much every company with a content catalog or streaming rights to some intellectual property is developing its own proprietary platform. In this case, Paramount owns the rights to Star Trek and is finally getting it all back from Netflix. As of July 1st, the last remaining Star Trek series on Netflix, the critically acclaimed Deep Space Nine, will be available exclusively on Paramount+.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine leaving Netflix is the end of an era in many ways. It may symbolically represent how the platform no longer has potentially unfettered access to major franchises; where Netflix could once license the rights to Star Trek and the various Marvel Comics properties that made up their pre-MCU shows, property holders have seen the value in directly managing them.
Netflix has recently been losing the battle against its major streaming competitors, Warner Bros.’ HBO Max and Disney+. The platform made major news and spooked investors when they projected slower subscriber growth in 2022 Q1 than the previous year, only to then disastrously lose subscribers. While that makes common sense to the average person (being that there is a finite number of people who could potentially use a service and thus a cap to growth), the mere idea that Netflix will not eternally increase profits has sparked lawsuits. In the grand scheme of things, Star Trek finally leaving Netflix is just one small piece of the economic pie, but still does not look great.
It also does not help that by losing Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Netflix is losing one of the most consistently acclaimed entries in the franchise. While Rotten Tomatoes currently shows Deep Space Nine trailing behind Strange New Worlds, Prodigy, and The Next Generation, the series has long been a fan favorite and praised for its long-form narrative arcs and examinations of moral ambiguity. While the majority of Star Trek shows are episodic in nature and feature a Starfleet crew traveling from planet to planet (or star or weird Dyson sphere or whatnot), Deep Space Nine centered on the fixed location of the titular space station and developing its characters and situations around that.
Star Trek is not only leaving Netflix. For a period of time, a number of franchise shows were licensed to Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, but as of January, those are also gone. Come July 1, Paramount+ will be the only place to stream any Star Trek shows and the only place any of the many new shows in the franchise will be available. So if you want to go where no one has gone before, soon you will have to go to…Paramount+.
