Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I don’t have an opinion on STAR TREK: PRODIGY, on its merits. I personally feel that I can’t have one, because I’ve never seen it*. This means that I absolutely have zero interest in wading through arguments for or against whether it should have been canceled, the reasons for its cancellation, and/or what its cancellation says about us as a country/culture/collection of sapient life forms/whatever. That’s not what I want to talk about.
What I do want to talk about is how this entire affair is an excellent reminder that you must never buy any entertainment that’s digital-only unless you fundamentally don’t care if it disappears after you’ve finished consuming it. When you buy digital-only, you’re only buying access; if you want the thing itself, you need to get it in physical, air-gapped, write-only form. Everything else is simply renting, and the thing you’re renting is only available at the whim of the rental agency.
This very much includes streaming services. Streaming services are, in fact, ‘buying-access’ in its purest form. It not only does not guarantee that a physical form of the product you like will be one day available for your purchase and perusal; it apparently assumes that it will not. This reality should probably be considered to be built into the streaming paradigm itself, thus making it as inexorable as the tides.
None of this is any comfort to ST: PRODIGY fans, I suppose. To them I can only suggest that they start pushing back on Paramount’s practices in the future. Who knows? It might even work.
Moe Lane
*Although I must point out that apparently neither has anybody else, which is why it’s being dropped from Paramount+.
I agree and have been expanding my physical collection. The problem is many new titles are only released as streaming options.
They certainly advertised it enough.
I’m undecided if it failed because it was bad, or because the title evoked the shade of Wesley Crusher.