Why isn’t Star Trek: Discovery on Netflix in the United States?

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Star Trek Discovery Not On Netflix Us

Star Trek: Discovery Copyright CBS

Star Trek: Discovery is back with its second season on CBS All Access and if you’re in the United States wondering when the first and second season will be dropping on Netflix. We’ve got bad news. Star Trek: Discovery will not be coming to Netflix in the US despite being a Netflix Original abroad. 

Star Trek hasn’t had a big TV series since the early 2000s when Enterprise was airing in a much different environment. It wasn’t until 2017 when CBS announced a brand new series called Discovery.

The biggest news regarding Discovery from a broadcast point of view is that it’d be airing exclusively on CBS’s then brand new streaming service as one of the first Originals on the platform.

Netflix announced it would be the international distributor for the series.

Why isn’t Star Trek: Discovery on Netflix in the US?

The reason should be fairly clear by this point as to why Star Trek: Discovery won’t be coming to Netflix in the US.

That reason is the same reason why Titans, the new DC streaming exclusive show and why The Handmaids Tale doesn’t come to Netflix. It’s on a competitor to Netflix that wants to bolster reasons for having a subscription to their service.

This is obviously a big problem for the future as eventually, you’ll have to have a subscription to every other streaming service.

If CBS All Access ever failed could it come to Netflix?

It’s likely that this could be a scenario although the streaming service is reporting strong subscriber growth so far and most importantly, doesn’t show any signs of going away anytime soon.

In August 2018, the service had 2.5 million subscribers. We’ll likely have to wait until later this year to see if that number continues to grow as the service anticipates “for 4 million subscribers in 2019, and 8 million in 2022.”

Speaking last year, David Stapf’s was the then head of CBS TV studios who stated: “My goal is that there should be a Star Trek something on all the time on All Access,”.

So there you have it, Star Trek: Discovery will likely never hit Netflix. There’s plenty of other Star Trek content on Netflix however, with the original series, Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise all being available on Netflix US at the time of writing.