Netflix Australia nabs new Star Trek series
The upcoming Star Trek series will debut on Netflix within 24 hours of its US broadcast, including within Australia.
One of the major points of contention for Netflix Australia subscribers has been the wide disparity between the content libraries offered in the US versus the content library offered in Australia. That disparity is largely down to the differing content deals that various studios cut with other players in the Australian market, exacerbated by Netflix’s increasing crackdown on VPN and DNS workarounds for Aussies wanting to sneak into the US catalog.
If you’re a lifelong Trekker – whether your tastes run to the adventures of Captain Kirk amongst the green skinned alien space babes, Captain Picard amongst the Shakespearean soliloquies posed by the holodeck, Captain Janeway lost in space, Captain Archer in federation pre-history or even Captain Sisko in the we-swear-we-didn’t-rip-off-Babylon-5 esque adventures of DS9 – you’ve probably been aware of the fact that Stan has offered access to a trove of Trek-related material for some time.
Recently Netflix made all that existing Trek content, including the animated series, available for Australians. Today, the streaming service has rolled that out even further, committing to offering all 727 existing episodes of Start Trek shows around the world by the end of 2016.
The good news doesn’t stop there, however, with Netflix announcing that the new, as-yet-unsuffixed Star Trek series will be made available worldwide within 24 hours of its US broadcast in 188 countries, including Australia. It’s part of a deal cut with CBS for the Trek rights, most of which it obviously already had access to in Australia, but that will also extend out to other Trek-less territories by the end of the year.
When Netflix announced its intention to instantly open up access to most of the world earlier in the year, it stated that its intention was to secure these kinds of worldwide deals for content to reduce user desire to jump territories, and it would appear that this is a good first step. Boldly going where no other streaming service has gone before, in fact.
