Want to watch the new Star Trek series? You'll have to pay

The new Star Trek is only going to be available on CBS All Access, which costs $5.99 a month

Growing up I was a Star Wars kid, which meant I had no time for Star Trek. After all, you can be one or the other, but not both. Still, I did like some of the movies, and when I saw the Internet light up today on the news of a new Star Trek TV show, the first one in over a decade, I admit it, I was a little intrigued. I figured I'd check it out, at the very least, and see if it was any good.

Then I saw the other piece of news that was announced along with it: the show isn't actually airing on television. In fact, I won't be able to see it at all.

The show, which is set to premiere in early 2017, is only going to be on CBS All Access, its Web subscription service that it debuted last year. That means that only those willing to pay $5.99 per month will be able to see it.

This is the first original series developed specifically for CBS All Access, which already offers every episode of all previous Star Trek television series.

The fact that a traditional broadcast network is going all digital for such a high profile show shows just how prevalent chord cutting has become in the last few years. Beyond networks like HBO and Showtime, even the cable companies themselves have started getting into it, with Dish and Comcast offering digital only packages.

I don't think I've ever seen any network do something like this before, though; every digital platform to come from a television network has always been cross platform. Even HBO and Showtime, which appealed to chord cutters by offering services that did not require a cable subscription, still offered the same content on their network. It wasn't as though you could only watch True Detective if you had HBO Now.

From the perspective of CBS, this is an opportunity for it to grow All Access, because Trekkies are likely to follow the show wherever it goes.

“We’ve experienced terrific growth for CBS All Access, expanding the service across affiliates and devices in a very short time. We now have an incredible opportunity to accelerate this growth with the iconic Star Trek, and its devoted and passionate fan base, as our first original series, Marc DeBevoise, Executive Vice President/General Manager at CBS Digital Media, said in a statement.

I am uncomfortable with this move, though. In my mind, chord cutting was all about choice. If you wanted to pay for cable, you'd pay for cable. If you wanted to just get broadcast channels, you could use a converter box and an antenna. And if you didn't want that, now you finally had a choice to watch online. Now CBS is taking that choice out of the hands of its viewers, and forcing them to spend extra money on a digital subscription that they might not want.

Maybe it was naive of me to think it was sustainable for both options to co-exist, especially when you realize that the more people who abandoned cable, the more quickly it was going to go away for good.

Also, this move by CBS isn't a total surprise, as CBS CEO Les Moonves telegraphed it last year when he said that he saw the future of programming as being all digital. I don't think that anyone thought he mean that would be the case so quickly, and so this move seems premature to me. I wonder if it may spark some backlash once people realize that they are already probably paying for CBS but not getting access to all of its content.

(Image source: latino-review.com)