I'm not sure how much of Discovery you saw last night, so I won't start up on that yet. However, yesterday before Discovery I messed around a bit with CBS All Access, and... I think they need to work harder.
First, their trial period sucks. I'm already in for now because I'm a big Star Trek nut, but in general they're going to be competing with services like Netflix and Prime. Whereas Netflix gives people a month to check out the services, CBS gives a week--for the version with commercials. The trial for the commercial-free option is all of two damn days.
Second, their lineup of originals kind of sucks. I know Netflix didn't come into creation with the strong lineup of original stuff they've got now, but we've known about Discovery being a pusher for All Access for nearly two years now; I thought there'd be a little more meat on the bones at this point. As far as I can see there are two proper shows (The Good Fight, Discovery) and two secondary shows (After Trek, some Big Brother thing).
Third, for something called CBS All Access, it seems to fail to give all access to CBS. Browsing the shows they show an episode count right away so it's easy to see which shows are in full and which are far from. I think Big Bang Theory had less than 10 episodes available, The Late Show seemed to have about a month's worth of shows (though The Late Late Show had many more), and Elementary only had clips.
Fourth, and considering how much they're trying to push this to Star Trek fans... I don't think it has the HD version of TNG? I wanted to put my connection to the test--what kind of quality would it default to, what kind of buffering ensued from trying too high, things like that. So I used All Good Things as my first test, and it looked surprisingly blurry even at max quality. I was at first worried even their max quality was just shit, but trying out some of the Discovery promos those came out fine. Also trying a TOS episode now, that seems to be the HD version. Trying another TNG episode now, it looks pretty bad. Like DVD version + mediocre recompression for streaming.
Being CBS, it makes sense that it has a TV focus. But having a Movies section with just 24 movies makes it seem smaller than if there was no movie section at all.
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