Trek Central reporting that Star Trek Prodigy has been cancelled and will be removed from Paramount+ in coming days.

💯

This is part of why the WGA is on strike

This. It's the new trend in streaming: Get better ROI for funding new content instead of paying residuals on your back catalog. The market is heading in a direction where subscribers won't just stick around forever if you're not constantly feeding them something new. So it makes more sense to put the money there instead.

"Max" has already dropped a lot of original content for this exact reason. And you can expect to continue seeing this trend across the streaming industry.

Remember the ongoing writers' strike? The pittance that they get paid in residuals from streaming is one of their main complaints. So you can expect the practice to accelerate after the strike is over.

The content will be shopped around to other platforms. You can probably expect some of it to end up on freemium/advertisement-based streaming services. The rest will just go into the proverbial vault.

Yeah this seems likely; they've supposedly cancelled the show as part of a content write-down (a bit like Discovery-Warner did, dumping shows, writing them off in their financial statments and not broadcasting them). It sounds like the shows makers have the rights to shop it around, and given season 2 is nearly complete it'll probably end up somewhere. Seems doubtful there would be a season 3 though.

Can someone please ELI5 this? If it's streamed on another service (which apparently it will), then wouldn't the creators have to be paid too? How does this all relate?

You'd think removing it would come after finding a new distributor, but I guess they don't want to give any possible advantage to a competitor.

This anti-competitive crap is rotting the whole industry.