It’s been about a month since the official merger of corporate media giants CBS and Viacom left the starting gate, and in one of the first public discussions on the topic since that announcement was made, CBS’s chief creative officer David Nevins spoke on the future of these two companies — and included Star Trek in his comments.

As part of his introductory remarks in at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2019 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference, Nevins was asked about how the merger of the two companies will help each other going forward.

“Well, you take these two great content companies, put them together. It’s been a long time in coming, but I’m glad to finally be there. Um, you’ve got, I think, I think that scale on a fundamental level that scale helps us, uh, address a rapidly, you know, rapidly evolving but very hungry market.

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I think [CBS has] had a good foray, where we’ve made big strides into a small streaming world, direct to consumer over the last almost five years now with [CBS] All Access and Showtime.

Those efforts are incredibly bolstered by the content and the platforms of Viacom, [which] has a history of sort of culture defining brands…. when you look at the CBS content mix [regarding] feature films and kids, obviously Viacom is going to be very, very helpful at addressing at addressing that. I think in general just scale its moment, a complimentary scale will be very helpful.”

He was also asked about the recent tactic to air several episodes of The Good Fight, a CBS drama which is distributed exclusively on CBS All Access — just like a certain sci-fi show you may have heard about — on the CBS broadcast network, Nevins described the effort to widen audience awareness to the Good Wife spinoff.

In doing so, he also brought up how the company is working to expand the viewer base for the Star Trek franchise, specifically trying to bring in a younger audience through the forthcoming Nickelodeon animated series currently in development.

Windowing is a creative exercise, and I think we’ve done it better than anybody over the years — and the value is (A) content monetization and (B) the building of IP… and, you know, creating awareness.

The example you asked about, ‘The Good Fight,’ I think it was both; you had this wonderful show that I think was a little underappreciated. We wanted to bring exposure to it [and] bring it to the broader CBS audience. [The CBS broadcast network] was the original home of ‘The Good Wife’ that gave birth to it, [it] gets more exposure, gets a bigger fan base.

Some of those people then want to see the subsequent seasons, they go back to subscribe to [CBS All Access]. You know, so that, that’s, that’s the monetization part of it.

So, you know, windowing is a skill and you’ve gotta be smart about it, [a] creative exercise in and of itself, and try to figure out what platforms are gonna bring the most attention to build the value of the IP. A lot of what we’re doing right now with ‘Star Trek’ is trying to build that brand.

It’s got a long history, but it’s a little, you know… we want to get [its audience] a little younger and we want to get it a little more relevant to people. There’s going to be an animated ‘Star Trek’ on Nickelodeon that’s already happening — so you’re exposing it and hopefully you create this virtuous ecosystem between all the platforms [ViacomCBS offers].

Among those ‘ecosystems’ mentioned by Nevins is the the “feature film” benefit that Viacom’s Paramount Pictures brings to the mix — the current home of all Star Trek film rights, one of many factors which likely contributed to the merger — but so far there’s still no word on the future of Trek movies (apart from that Tarantino situation), stopped in their tracks since Kelvin Timeline lead Chris Pine walked away from salary negotiations more than a year ago.

We’ll keep you posted on any more Star Trek news to come out of the ongoing CBS – Viacom merger process as it breaks, so keep sensors locked here at TrekCore.