In today’s second-quarter CBS Corporation earnings call, CEO Les Moonves spoke to the current status of their CBS All Access streaming platform, the United States’ exclusive home of next year’s STAR TREK: DISCOVERY series.

Our CBS All Access and Showtime OTT streaming services have surpassed two million subscribers, about evenly split, well ahead of where we’d thought we’d be this early in the game. We’ve licensed our ‘Star Trek’ franchise in the international marketplace, guaranteeing our new series will be profitable even before it launches and begins driving [subscriptions] here in the US on CBS All Access.

Moonves previously predicted that international sales of DISCOVERY would cover about 60% of the production costs of the new series, and as reported a few weeks ago, STAR TREK: DISCOVERY will be distributed via Netflix to 188 countries – not counting either the USA or Canada.

It seems that his prediction has come true, as Moonves revealed today that the new series is already profitable, ahead of either production or premiere.

We also struck a significant international deal with Netflix for ‘Star Trek,’ licensing our new series ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ to 188 Netflix countries around the world – virtually everywhere but North America. In addition, we licensed all 727 previous episodes of our ‘Star Trek’ library. Plus, we struck a similar deal with Bell Media for Canada. As a result, ‘Star Trek: Discovery,’ our new series, is profitable – and we haven’t even begun production. We still have additional windows to sell the show in second and third cycles down the road. It’s also safe to say that ‘Star Trek’ will lead to a significant bump in subscribers for CBS All Access here in the US.

Joe Ianniello, CBS’s Chief Operating Officer, spoke to the choice to license DISCOVERY to one international outlet – Netflix – rather than dozens of local distributors in different countries.

We looked at the marketplace and decided what was best for the franchise. Netflix obviously had the previous seasons before… it was one [licensing] deal as opposed to executing a hundred different deals in different countries – and by the way, it was a lot of money in US dollars. So when you summed it all up, it just kind of made sense.

Moonves expanded on those comments, with both Netflix’s success with Trek – and hints toward a yet-unofficial longevity for the new show.

The reason the Netflix buy was so healthy [is because Netflix] has already seen what ‘Star Trek’ is doing on their service. From day one, it performed extraordinarily well. That is one of the reason we decided to put it on All Access, obviously, to help build our own [subscriptions]. Going forward, obviously, we’re doing thirteen episodes initially with ‘Star Trek,’ we are fairly certain – although we haven’t done one day of production – that the series is gonna go on for a while. We have spin-offs of spin-offs, you know? It’s a very, very valuable franchise that can turn into hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for us.

Despite the availability of the new show through Netflix around the world, it’s safe to say that there is still widespread apprehension from American fans about the need to subscribe to yet another streaming platform; Moonves has previously stated that a significant marketing push will begin as 2017 approaches.

We’ll continue to pay attention to the development of CBS All Access as it becomes available.