CBS Studios (formerly the original Paramount Television, CBS Paramount Television, and CBS Television Studios) is a television production company owned by Paramount Global, the conglomerate that holds the production rights of all Star Trek television series.
The studio produces Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, as well as the aftershow The Ready Room. It also produced Star Trek: Short Treks and the previous aftershow, After Trek.
CBS Studios also owns the animation studio CBS Eye Animation Productions, which produces Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Prodigy.
Paramount Pictures became the owner of Star Trek franchise, after it had absorbed Desilu in 1967 and incorporated it in its Paramount Television unit. Under this moniker it finished up on Star Trek: The Original Series and went on to become the producer of the Berman-era television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager. The original Viacom acquired Paramount in 1994, then acquired the original CBS Studios in 2000. CBS' studio operations and Paramount's television arm were consolidated into the CBS Paramount Television unit as part of the merger, and as such were responsible for the production of Star Trek: Enterprise.
The television production company took its current form as the result of the late 2005 decision, formalized on 17 January 2006, to split up the original Viacom conglomerate into two separate publicly traded companies, CBS Corporation and a new Viacom. CBS Corporation acquired Paramount's hitherto combined television dependency, including all rights and title to the entirety of the Star Trek franchise, while now former franchise owner Paramount Pictures, which became a purely feature film studio under the ownership of the new Viacom, had to negotiate a separate license in order to produce new Star Trek films.
On the same occasion the former combined television subsidiary was split into three separate, now independent (meaning, having their own profitability responsibilities) corporate entities, the distributor CBS Television Distribution, the broadcaster CBS Studios (essentially the original broadcaster, it therefore coming full circle) and the television production company CBS Paramount Television, for the time being retaining the original combination name until rechristened CBS Television Studios in 2009. Discovery became the first Star Trek live-action production in which Paramount had no involvement in whatsoever.
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On 8 October 2020, ViacomCBS rebranded CBS Television Studios by dropping the word "Television" from its name as part of the brand identiy unification across all CBS divisons and platforms. [1]
On 8 August 2023, it was announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) had given CBS Studios permission to use Star Trek in nonfungible tokens and crypto collectibles. [2]
Rebirth and demise of Paramount Television Studios[]
The loss of its television division in the 2005 split has never sat well with Paramount, and the studio subsequently decided to institute a brand new Paramount Television Studios production unit in 2013 as a substitute for the one it lost to CBS. Stock market analysts had expected this unit to be merged with CBS Television Studios in the wake of the December 2019 reunification of Viacom and CBS into the ViacomCBS conglomerate, an expectation reinforced by – besides the logical and obvious cost saving effects such a merger would entail – the circumstance that Paramount motion picture productions have already been added to the backlog library of an as of 2020 yet to be launched unified streaming service intended as successor for CBS All Access. This eventually became Paramount+. [3] [4]
That merger never occurred though, not then that is, resulting in that the reformed conglomerate had to maintain two separate television production studios which operated completely independently from each other, an illogical situation that endured for two decades until August 2024. By then the to Paramount Global renamed conglomerate was forced to close down Paramount Television Studios as it faced a severe financial crisis at the time, brought on by among others the billions of dollars in operating losses incurring streaming industry for which Paramount Television Studios had been producing content – quite successfully so actually, with such series as Jack Ryan, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Time Bandits – and which included its own Paramount+ as well, ironically. It was not the lack of success that made Paramount Global decide to announce the closure of Paramount Television on 13 August to be effected five days later, but their decision to fire 15 percent of its entire employee pool, which left Paramount Television with too few people to keep its doors open (television studios usually employ tenured staff, whereas film studios hire freelancer staff on a per project basis). Predecessor CBS Studios was not exempt from loosing staff either, but it, as the larger one, was kept open and actually became the recipient of some of the former Paramount Television key staffers besides the television series they had in production and/or under development at the time. [5] [6] [7] Essentially, this became the belated merger stock analyst had already expected back in 2019.
See also[]
External links[]
- CBS Studios at Wikipedia
- Paramount Television at Wikipedia – the original Paramount television unit lost to CBS
- Paramount Television Studios at Wikipedia – the current re-incarnation of the Paramount television unit