All Access: Not Truly ALL Access?
Possibly the most alarming thing that I discovered during my trial of All Access is the fact that, despite CBS advertising the “complete catalogs” of your favorite shows, I found this not to be the case for some currently airing series.
Take Supergirl for example: since the show’s move from its original home on CBS to the CW, the first season of Supergirl is no where to be found on All Access despite it being there a few months ago. And during the first season’s run, only a handful of episodes were available at any given time. Meaning, if someone was to purchase an All Access sub near the end of a show’s season, they would not be able to go and watch that season from the beginning. In fact, for shows currently mid-season, I’m not sure there would be any legal way to do that.
This seems to be true of many (but not all) of CBS’s hit shows including Two Broke Girls (episodes from Season 5, Episode 10 available at the time of writing), The Big Bang Theory (from Season 9, Episode 12), and Elementary (from Season 4, Episode 1). Mysteriously, some shows such as Blue Bloods and The Amazing Race offer up their entire catalog.
The explanation for this might be that Supergirl, The Big Bang Theory, and Two Broke Girls (among other All Access programming that shares the same limited catalog fate) are all owned by Warner Bros. and only distributed by CBS. But what of Elementary, which is produced by CBS Television Studios?
Now, it’s not clear that this restricted catalog model will be applied to Star Trek: Discovery, and in all honesty, we don’t think it will. But the possibility is enough to make one a bit nervous, and it does make me feel a bit taken for a ride when one of All Access’ biggest selling points is the ability to watch all of CBS’s shows on demand.