Yesterday afternoon CBS CEO Leslie Moonves participated in a conference call with investors to talk about the first quarter earnings for the corporation ($3.27 billion, beating Wall Street estimates). While the call focused on a lot of investment-related minutiae, the subject of Star Trek: Discovery and its relation to CBS All Access came up a few times.

Early on in the call Moonves gave an overview of how things were going with All Access, including an update on production for Discovery:

The anticipation for Star Trek: Discovery continues to build. The cast is fantastic. We have already had a couple of episodes in the can that we’ve seen. So we are very excited. It will launch later this fall.

Star Trek: Discovery began production in late January and was announced to have a 13-episode first season. Moonves’ comment also repeats his estimate that the show would launch in the fall, which he had said the day before while speaking on a panel at the Milken Initiative Global Conference.

Star Trek is the big kahuna, expecting younger viewers



Moonves also said that CBS still expects All Access and the Showtime app to get to a combined total of 8 million subscribers by 2020. As of right now, he said the subscriber numbers for All Access were “in the neighborhood” of 1.5 million. On the subject of growth, as he has done before, Moonves noted the importance of Star Trek: Discovery to CBS All Access:

We’ve only had the NFL on All Access for the last two weeks and it spiked a lot during those two weeks. Which leaves us very excited about having it for a full season and able to promote it…The Good Fight was our first scripted drama there. At the end of the day we were extremely pleased creatively with it and the numbers ended up really really good. Obviously we have the big kahuna coming up with Star Trek…We are fairly confident the strategy really is working well.

CBS also revealed some demographics for All Access, saying that subscribers were evenly split between men and women and averaged about 20 years younger than regular CBS television viewers. Moonves also predicted “Star Trek will bring us even younger.”

CBS All Access/Showtime package

Moonves also revealed that starting next week CBS will begin to offer a combined package with both CBS All Access and the Showtime stand-alone streaming service. He said this will offer convenience for those who want both services and there would also be a small discount. This will be good news for fans of both Star Trek and Twin Peaks, which returns on Showtime later this month.

Keep up with all the Star Trek: Discovery news at TrekMovie.