CBS held their end-of-2017 corporate earnings call today with media and investors, where company CEO Les Moonves recapped the year in CBS business news and took questions on the company’s recent moves.
First, the Moonves touted CBS’s success in growing their over-the-top streaming offerings — CBS All Access and Showtime’s streaming service — and noted that the company would be launching additional services for CBS News, CBS Sports, and Entertainment Tonight as 2018 continues.
Specifically speaking to the CBS All Access and Showtime services, Moonves revealed that their market research has found that the average age of CBS streaming customers is 20 years younger than the average age of their CBS broadcast network viewers.
Nearly 80% of CBS streaming customers are between 18-49 years old, with an average viewer age of 38 years old in that bracket.
He also told listeners that the combined CBS All Access and Showtime subscriber numbers are at nearly 5 Million, with expectations to heartily meet or beat the company’s goal of 8 Million subscribers by 2020 — noting that CBS All Access is expanding to Canada, Australia, Europe, “and beyond,” and that at present the two services are actually “neck and neck” in terms of splitting that 5M total fairly evenly.
Moonves stated that subscribers to CBS All Access specifically have doubled compared to one year ago, and that January 2018 was the “best month ever” for the service. He also spoke to upcoming projects like the second season of The Good Fight starting in March, and the forthcoming Twilight Zone reboot coming from Jordan Peele later in the year.
“Star Trek was as an expensive a production as we’ve ever done,” Moonves commented, again referencing the large investment of capital from Netflix which helped fund the series for international distribution; the exec also confirmed that the second season of production would be starting up in April as previously reported.
Though Star Trek: Discovery has ended its run for the year, we’re not done with our coverage! Look for our final Canon Connections analysis in the next few days, along with more Discovery content here at TrekCore in the coming weeks.