Not everyone has access to CBS All Access or SPACE, Crave or Netflix.
Why do people insist on talking about these things as if a show on a given service will never exist anywhere else? There's this whole thing called home video. I couldn't see
Powers when it premiered because I didn't have the PlayStation network, but it was out on DVD within a couple of months after its season ended, and I eventually managed to see the whole series for free by borrowing the disks from my library. I just had to wait a while longer, that's all. I'm sure
Discovery will be out on DVD in time, just like every other Trek series. In the long term, which kind of service it premiered on won't matter at all. Once it's out on home video, you won't need CBS All Access to see it, any more than you need a time machine and a TV antenna to see TOS.
For that matter, the exact same principle applied to all the Trek movies. You couldn't see them for free on TV when they first came out; you had to go to a theater and buy a ticket. They were only available to a limited, paying audience -- at first. If you didn't want to pay to see them in a theater, you just had to wait until they showed up on commercial TV or on home video.
I'm with TheAlmanac. CBS's ultimate goal is to get you to watch the show. They don't want to have alternatives. If a person somehow can't watch it, that person doesn't matter to them.
That's not the way the industry works. The whole reason things like tie-ins and home video exist is because anything that attracts more attention to a franchise is good for it. It's absurd to see two different forms of getting the same franchise before the public's eyes as competitors to each other. On the contrary, they complement each other, which is the entire reason they exist in the first place. If you buy the first season when it comes out on DVD or Blu-Ray, and you like it enough that you don't want to wait for the second season, then you might buy a subscription to CBSAA then. It's the long game.
It's the same now as it was with pay cable decades ago. I couldn't see the first five seasons of
Stargate SG-1 when they were brand new, because I didn't subscribe to Showtime. But the show was released in wider syndication a year behind its release on Showtime, so I did get to see it, just a year later than subscribers did. Same with Showtime's
Outer Limits. The only difference is that subscribers got to see it earlier and uncut. But it did become available by other means eventually, because multimedia distribution is good for a show's profits. The different releases aren't in competition with each other, because a large share of their profits ultimately goes to the same place.
