CBS told investors that they believe that Star Trek could bring in $400 Million in new subscribers for their streaming service.
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Exstreamist is reporting that CBS hopes their new Star Trek series will bring in $400 million dollars in new subscribers for their streaming service. CBS won’t just be depending on Star Trek, they will be adding other original content to CBS All Access, but that’s still a lot of pressure on the new Trek.
$400 Million seems like an unreasonable goal, let’s take a look at the math.
Let’s assume that CBS doesn’t dump all the episodes of the new Trek at the same time; they space them out and release one a week. This goes against the convention with streaming services, but you get the feeling CBS will manage their series this way. The first episode of Star Trek will appear on CBS proper after all and CBS already distributes their other content weekly.
Let’s also assume that the new Trek is going to have new episodes released over a span of 4 months; that’s actually being pretty generous when you look at series like Game of Thrones which only last 2.5 months each year.
The CBS streaming service costs $6 dollars a month; so for each household who signs up for CBS All Access for those 4 months CBS is looking at $24 dollars total. Some of these households will stay on the service long term, and some will cancel early. If CBS is expecting big dollars in year one though, we will just take into account those 4 months.
So at $24 dollars per household CBS needs 16,666,666 households to sign up for CBS All Access to reach their $400 million goal. That means the new Star Trek would have to do better than the most popular show on TV right now, Empire, which is only averaging 13 million viewers each week.
Maybe CBS is looking at subscribers for a whole year though, which leads us to 5,555,555 subscribers. 5.5 million subscribers is a much more reasonable goal, but will you keep all of those for an entire year?
There’s no doubt in our mind that the new Star Trek will be a huge success, we’re just not sure it’s going to live up to CBS’ $400 million dollar dreams.
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What do you think? Do you think CBS can make $400 Million on Star Trek? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook.