Star Trek: Discovery

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, nanoplasm said:

As mentioned in another thread, the Spore Drive principle is basically the zero-time Vajra fold network.

Harness the power of v-virus/spore, for instantaneous communication/travel to any node on the galaxy-wide network, which is formed by colonies of vajra/fungus.

More a poor man's Iconian Gateway network... something which existed in Star Trek way before the Vajra and Macross Frontier came to be.

 

7 hours ago, nanoplasm said:

Throw in some cheeky FX (spinning saucer, ship teleportation with afterimage and sentai/kamen sfx), shonen manga combat tactics (wait for enemy ship to charge into you, teleport out, but leave behind some primed torpedo), and that describes the space combat of STD.

That last one's just Voyager's signature anti-Borg trick in reverse.

[TehPW]

I thought the Iconian Gate stuff was Star Trek Online-based (based on a episode was vague on the subject to begin with)

[Seto Kaiba]

1 minute ago, TehPW said:

I thought the Iconian Gate stuff was Star Trek Online-based (based on a episode was vague on the subject to begin with)

They appeared twice in Star Trek television shows... once in TNG's 2nd season ("Contagion") and once in DS9's 4th season ("To The Death").

On both occasions, they harped on the way the Iconian gateways could take you anywhere instantaneously as easily as walking through an ordinary door.  That was how the Iconians managed their entire empire.

[TehPW]

I completely brain farted about TNG (when I was thinking TOS)...

[UN Spacy]

 

[UN Spacy]

WOW! So they’ve...

jumped to the Mirror Universe!

 

Didn't know Last night’s episode was directed by Jonathan Frakes. Also please tell me Dr Kulber isn’t gone for good.

 Loved the Captain Killy scene and turbolift fight...nice move by Burnam. Also, holy crap the USS Defiant!

[azrael]

25 minutes ago, UN Spacy said:

WOW! So they’ve...

  Hide contents

 Also, holy crap the USS Defiant!

 

Yep.

Good olde NCC-1764. Talk about your throw backs. The issue with this is, shouldn't the Terran Empire have torn Defiant down to learn as much about it as they could? That ship is 100 years old by this time. But I guess we'll find out.

[Seto Kaiba]

Oy vey... it was awful nice of them to remind me right off the bat why I decided this series wasn't even worth pirating.  Saves me a lot of trouble down the road.

This just feels like they've admitted that casual viewership can keep the show afloat but that they'll need the support of the die-hard fanbase once its gritty, substance-less, action-centric writing starts to get old and are trying to draw them back by pandering to that demographic with one of the standard Star Trek episode plots.  Having Frakes direct it was a cheap ploy to get their attention.

 

5 minutes ago, azrael said:

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Good olde NCC-1764. Talk about your throw backs. The issue with this is, shouldn't the Terran Empire have torn Defiant down to learn as much about it as they could? That ship is 100 years old by this time. But I guess we'll find out.

By that point in history, they'd already built their own.

[tekering]

On 1/9/2018 at 7:45 AM, UN Spacy said:

  Hide contents

Also please tell me Dr Kulber isn’t gone for good.

 

I certainly hope he is.  I actually really like the character, and I've loved Wilson Cruz since My So-Called Life, but...

Spoiler

...his sudden and brutal death was such an unexpected twist that I forgot all about the mirror universe nonsense.  Voq's reveal is something we've been waiting for (especially since After Trek's earlier predictions), and that scene was the only interesting thing that happened in the episode.  To somehow undo it would cheapen its impact.

 

[TehPW]

On ‎1‎/‎8‎/‎2018 at 7:03 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Oy vey... it was awful nice of them to remind me right off the bat why I decided this series wasn't even worth pirating.  Saves me a lot of trouble down the road.

This just feels like they've admitted that casual viewership can keep the show afloat but that they'll need the support of the die-hard fanbase once its gritty, substance-less, action-centric writing starts to get old and are trying to draw them back by pandering to that demographic with one of the standard Star Trek episode plots.  Having Frakes direct it was a cheap ploy to get their attention.

 

By that point in history, they'd already built their own.

But how many? Consider this: Emperor Sato would still have to deal with consolidating her rule long before the idea of letting techs onboard to start decoding the secrets of HOW the UPF Star Fleet built the Constitution-class. They would have to create the infrastructure involved in the shipyard building process, the logistics to support the effort and be able to preform the work without duress (other than the normal duress the Mirror-Fleet would self inflict, of course): Still gotta smite them pesky Vulcans, Andorians and the like in-line. Sure the Mirror Ent was ISS-1701 but I'll be betting a pound of Dylithium the ISS number was more of a play to spoof their enemies (as opposed to Star Fleet actually having built 1700+ vessels over the course of the Star Fleet's existence at the time of TOS)

[Seto Kaiba]

12 hours ago, TehPW said:

But how many? Consider this: Emperor Sato would still have to deal with consolidating her rule long before the idea of letting techs onboard to start decoding the secrets of HOW the UPF Star Fleet built the Constitution-class. They would have to create the infrastructure involved in the shipyard building process, the logistics to support the effort and be able to preform the work without duress (other than the normal duress the Mirror-Fleet would self inflict, of course): Still gotta smite them pesky Vulcans, Andorians and the like in-line.

They were supposed to be on a roughly comparable level, technologically, so one would assume that the Terran Empire had around a dozen Constitution-class knockoffs c.2255 like the UFP had.

 

 

12 hours ago, TehPW said:

Sure the Mirror Ent was ISS-1701 but I'll be betting a pound of Dylithium the ISS number was more of a play to spoof their enemies (as opposed to Star Fleet actually having built 1700+ vessels over the course of the Star Fleet's existence at the time of TOS)

All told, even in the Star Trek expanded universe it's basically an article of faith that there are huge gaps in the Starfleet registry code system.  It's lampshaded quite amusingly at one point that even starship captains have no sodding idea what "NCC" actually stands for... even when they were still using at most triple-digit registries.

There are a bunch of theories as to why they skipped so many numbers, but even in pre-Federation days there were HUGE gaps.  The NX-class has registry numbers that are double digits starting with zero, then there's a jump of over 60 numbers to the next known starship class (the Intrepid-class), and another huge jump of over 100 to the next (Daedalus-class).

[Dobber]

Remember some smaller vessels, like Runabouts, still received NCC numbers. So there could be a Large number of small scout like or large shuttle/runabout type vessels that could fill in the registry gaps.

So i binge watched the series up to the latest episode with a 3 day free trial and I quite liked it....BUT....it is not worth $9.99 a month. There is nothing else on that stupid All Access that I want. Hopefully, the show will be able to purchase after the full season is complete. So that way I can watch it whenever I want instead of paying $9.99 indefinitely just to be able to watch it whenever. If not then I’ll just pay 1 month every year and watch a whole season.  Stupid CBS.

Chris

[Seto Kaiba]

21 hours ago, Dobber said:

Remember some smaller vessels, like Runabouts, still received NCC numbers. So there could be a Large number of small scout like or large shuttle/runabout type vessels that could fill in the registry gaps.

Granted, Starfleet did give ships in the "runabout" classification their own registry numbers as befitting their status as independent short-to-mid range warp-capable craft... but the "runabout" classification itself was a relatively new introduction to the Starfleet inventory in the second half of the 24th century.  By that point the Starfleet registry number system had already long since reached the high five digit range.  The Danube-class used extensively in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and on occasion in The Next Generation was Starfleet's first design in the runabout classification and that was commissioned in 2368.

Like I said, there are a number of theories to explain why there are such large skips in registry numbers.  The one I find most plausible, and which has a fair amount of support in Expanded Universe material, is that the first few digits are a kind of "contract number" and the last few digits refer to the individual vessel itself.  A contract might be for X vessels from a given class design, with those having sequential numbers, while other ships of the same class built under a different contract will have numbers in a different range.  That'd explain why there are cases of especially old classes still in service having ships with three, four, or five digit registry codes like the Oberth-class, Excelsior-class, etc.  A contract may not actually use the full range reserved for it.

 

21 hours ago, Dobber said:

So i binge watched the series up to the latest episode with a 3 day free trial and I quite liked it....BUT....it is not worth $9.99 a month. There is nothing else on that stupid All Access that I want. Hopefully, the show will be able to purchase after the full season is complete. So that way I can watch it whenever I want instead of paying $9.99 indefinitely just to be able to watch it whenever. If not then I’ll just pay 1 month every year and watch a whole season.  Stupid CBS.

Seems to be the attitude of a lot of American viewers... $9.99 wouldn't be objectionable price-wise if it wasn't essentially just for Discovery.  The people watching it on Netflix outside the US are much happier with the arrangement because the streaming service carrying it there has enough other content to be worth the investment.  

[TehPW]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Granted, Starfleet did give ships in the "runabout" classification their own registry numbers as befitting their status as independent short-to-mid range warp-capable craft... but the "runabout" classification itself was a relatively new introduction to the Starfleet inventory in the second half of the 24th century.  By that point the Starfleet registry number system had already long since reached the high five digit range.  The Danube-class used extensively in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and on occasion in The Next Generation was Starfleet's first design in the runabout classification and that was commissioned in 2368.

Like I said, there are a number of theories to explain why there are such large skips in registry numbers.  The one I find most plausible, and which has a fair amount of support in Expanded Universe material, is that the first few digits are a kind of "contract number" and the last few digits refer to the individual vessel itself.  A contract might be for X vessels from a given class design, with those having sequential numbers, while other ships of the same class built under a different contract will have numbers in a different range.  That'd explain why there are cases of especially old classes still in service having ships with three, four, or five digit registry codes like the Oberth-class, Excelsior-class, etc.  A contract may not actually use the full range reserved for it.

 

Seems to be the attitude of a lot of American viewers... $9.99 wouldn't be objectionable price-wise if it wasn't essentially just for Discovery.  The people watching it on Netflix outside the US are much happier with the arrangement because the streaming service carrying it there has enough other content to be worth the investment.  

Do you mean like how the USAF numbers their Aircraft (The Year the frame was build - the position number in that calendar year in all the air frames built for that Calendar year? (as opposed to the Navy, who's number system is literally shows how many AC they have ever build, regardless of the year)

Edited January 14, 2018 by TehPW
I cans Spells! eeeerrrrhhh

[Seto Kaiba]

Just now, TehPW said:

Does you mean like how the USAF numbers their Aircraft (The Year the frame was build - the position number in that calendar year in all the air frames built for that Calendar year? (as opposed to the Navy, who's number system is literally shows how many AC they have ever build, regardless of the year)

Somethin' like that, yeah... I would've compared it to VIN numbers, but it's the same basic principle.

It'd explain why there are multiple classes of starship mixed together in the same numerical range, like how there are Daedalus-class and Intrepid-class starships, and Antares-class freighters all mixed together in the same number series.

There are still some weird aberrations, like the Oberth-class ships that look to be on par, technologically, with the Constitution-class refit and Excelsior-class yet have registries that were only three digit numbers initially.

[TehPW]

Well its possible to explain that (the Grissom with it's NCC-838 as a refit from a previous class, kinda like how the Constellation's NCC-1017 [which we all know was simply because the model kit company didn't include extra numbers to allow the film model any variety] was refit into a Constitution-class from a previously unknown vessel type).

[Seto Kaiba]

21 minutes ago, TehPW said:

Well its possible to explain that (the Grissom with it's NCC-838 as a refit from a previous class, kinda like how the Constellation's NCC-1017 [which we all know was simply because the model kit company didn't include extra numbers to allow the film model any variety] was refit into a Constitution-class from a previously unknown vessel type).

I'm not really sure how that would work.

I mean, there's loads of precedent for refits and variant subclasses within a class of starships that change its outward appearance like the Constitution-class refit or the Enterprise-B subclass of the Excelsior-class.  I don't think we've ever had a case of a ship of one class being upgraded or retrofitted into a whole other class of starship.  The creative staff for the Star Trek: Discovery series recently attempted to explain the difference in appearance of the Constitution-class wireframe for the Defiant vs. the classic Constitution-class as a retrofit carried out by the Terran Empire.

I suppose it's theoretically possible that the Oberth-class was really an older class of starship from some point prior to the Constitution-class's development, but to accommodate the unusual registry number on the Grissom she'd have to be a contemporary of the Antares-class freighters from the early 2200s.  That'd make the Oberth-class hands down the oldest class of ship in the Federation Starfleet by at least half a century.  The non-canon Galaxy-class technical manual suggests a design lifespan of approximately one hundred years for a modern (c. 2360) Federation starship, but the Oberth-class would be approaching double that if they're still in service around the events of Nemesis, and they probably weren't built with an eye towards lasting even that long.  (Mind you, some of the Relaunch timeline novels suggest the Starfleet Corps of Engineers have bandaided a few truly ancient ships such as Daedalus-class ships into continuous use, and those would be even older as the class is a relic of the Romulan War.)

[David Hingtgen]

12 hours ago, TehPW said:

Well its possible to explain that (the Grissom with it's NCC-838 as a refit from a previous class, kinda like how the Constellation's NCC-1017 [which we all know was simply because the model kit company didn't include extra numbers to allow the film model any variety] was refit into a Constitution-class from a previously unknown vessel type).

It's always bugged me that they didn't simply make the Constellation, 1710.  That'd fix all the problems.  

Or, if they had the FX budget to buy TWO kits, they could combine the decal sheets and get 1707, 1711, 1717, etc.    

[slaginpit]

this series has peaked my interest a bit.

So are the klingons going to experiment on themselves now and look more human?

[Sandman]

9 hours ago, slaginpit said:

this series has peaked my interest a bit.

So are the klingons going to experiment on themselves now and look more human?

That’s frickin stupid if that’s the case. Enterprise already explained the human Klingons.

[Seto Kaiba]

19 hours ago, slaginpit said:

this series has peaked my interest a bit.

So are the klingons going to experiment on themselves now and look more human?

As @Sandman said, that's been done already.

The fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise already gave us the explanation for the human-looking Klingons in Star Trek's original series in the two-parter "Afflication" and "Divergence".  That was a result of an imperfect fix for a botched Klingon genetic engineering experiment to create augment Klingons using DNA obtained from the remains of the Eugenics Wars-era augments that Dr. Soong had "liberated".  The augment DNA had been picked up by an alien flu virus and become a highly-contagious retrovirus that was lethally mangling Klingon DNA.  Dr. Phlox's treatment could only do so much for the already-infected, and only stopped the virus in the early stages... resulting in their loss of cranial ridges, and biochemical changes that made them behaviorally more like humans.

In the Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch novels, the victims of the virus are called QuchHa' (which is apparently Klingon for "unhappy ones") and were second-class citizens in the Empire until a cure was found over a century later.

By the time Star Trek Discovery is set, the human-looking QuchHa' Klingons had already been a thing for over a century.  (101 years, 5 months, and 14 days if we're counting the days between "Affliction" and "The Vulcan Hello".)

[Sildani]

Hey, Seto, are there any Trek novels you actually like?

[Seto Kaiba]

7 minutes ago, Sildani said:

Hey, Seto, are there any Trek novels you actually like?

There were a few in the Pocket Books Star Trek: the Next Generation line that I remember enjoying, in no small part because they were treated as stand-alone "episodes" set during the series.  I rather enjoyed Masks and Gulliver's Fugitives from that series.  Q-Squared would've been enjoyable if they hadn't spent so goddamn much time on "Trelane is insane now".

The Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch has its moments, if you ignore all that rot with the Caeliar which tied into Star Trek Destiny.  I'd rate the Archer/Reed/T'Pol A-plot in the Rise of the Federation story arc as probably the best material the various relaunches have produced... provided you exclude the novel Uncertain Logic, which boasted an idiot plot that requires every living Vulcan to be a drooling moron with the attention span and memory of a goldfish.  The ongoing B-plot of "Trip Tucker is an agent of Section 31" sucks a lot of the enjoyment out of it though, since he's arguably the galaxy's most inept spy and is constantly being captured and manipulated by his captors.  It also lost a few points for having what may be the most cringeworthy and forced attempt to be transgender-inclusive that I've ever seen.

The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine relaunch had a few good installments.  The Left Hand of Destiny's probably its finest hour, being essentially a Klingon version of the Arthurian mythos with Martok as Arthur.  The only downside was it absolutely put Martok through the wringer and managed to take several one-note characters and make them extremely likeable before killing them off.  (Especially Martok's aide-de-camp.)  The Never-Ending Sacrifice was pretty good, like Martok's The Left Hand of Destiny duology, it's a more in-depth look at the geopolitical (astropolitical?) situation in an alien power (Cardassia) as seen through the eyes of someone who doesn't necessarily agree with all of their culture's views.  (And boy did they ever make poor Rugal WORK for his happy ending.)

Articles of the Federation was pretty good, for many of the same reasons above, being a more in-depth look into the running of the UFP's government via terribly snarky and sarcastic President Nanietta Bacco (fmr. councilor for Cestus III).

Almost everything in the Star Trek: the Next Generation relaunch is rubbish, with a high turnover in characters as the authors try every lame cliche they can think of in the hopes of coming up with one that's actually likeable.  Their worst so far seems to be a Vulcan genki girl, but the security officers trying a mutiny on Picard was just too much to believe.

The Star Trek: Voyager relaunch less a dumpster fire and more an out-of-control dumpster inferno featuring some of the worst prose I've ever laid eyes on in ANY franchise EVER.  The writers have Janeway live down to EVERY negative stereotype of "strong women" possible, and she achieves never-before-seen heights of Mary Suedom as a result.  Its sole redeeming feature is the new ship's counselor, Hugh Cambridge, who is so utterly, transparently modeled on Hugh Laurie's titular character from House that it's astonishing they haven't been sued yet.  (Did we mention Mr. Laurie attended Cambridge, just in case anyone was in any doubt where that name came from?)  He's the one straight man who seems to realize how utterly crappy the books are and is resolved to punish the entire cast in the most ironic fashion possible, which is often hilarious... like locking Harry and Tom in the holodeck and torturing them both in the guise of Chaotica for several days.

Outside that, I'm quite fond of How Much for Just the Planet?.  It's campy enough that it feels like it really could be an episode of TOS or TAS with very little effort, and manages to be quite funny for a series that ostensibly doesn't do comedy.  (Reading it, one might come down with the headcanon that Willy Wonka as portrayed by Gene Wilder is a native of Direidi, possibly one of their politicians.)  It's ham and it REJOICES in it.

[UN Spacy]

Last episode was excellent...just loving this arc. TWO more episodes to go.

 

 

[UN Spacy]

https://twitter.com/startreknetflix/status/959129816149536768

Edited February 1, 2018 by UN Spacy

[azrael]

3 hours ago, UN Spacy said:

https://twitter.com/startreknetflix/status/959129816149536768

Only for locations outside of the US. US is still locked into CBS All Access.

Discover the unknown.

#StarTrekDiscovery streams weekly on Netflix. Follow @startrekcbs for the US.

[Marzan]

I like the preview. This arc has gotten pretty good after a rather silly start.

[UN Spacy]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

All in all, Star Trek: Discovery is REALLY feeling like a bad fanfic these days.

I used to think its biggest problem was that it was trying very hard to be an action series instead of the contemplating science fiction that previous shows have been.  This Mirror Universe arc definitely disabused me of that notion.

Discovery would have been an eminently salvageable series if it had decent writers.

Spoiler

Seriously.  The writers did just about everything wrong in Star Trek: Discovery.

The era they picked for the series, the mid-23rd century only a decade or so before the era of James T. Kirk and the USS Enterprise's five year mission of high adventure, is about the worst era they could've chosen for the kind of story they wanted to tell.  The Federation of this time period was at its most aspirational and held an unassailable moral high ground.  They'd made themselves into a society that was beyond racism and sexism, beyond social class, beyond all the problems of modern society and had formed an ideal social democracy.  The war with the Klingons had already settled down into a Cold War five years before Discovery's time.

Star Trek: Discovery's Federation is a proto-fascist government full of xenophobes.  Sarek, the Federation's number one ambassador, seemingly thinks humans are an inferior species... that doesn't jive with the fact that he's married to one at that time, and that attitudes towards the human race on Vulcan had already started to change over 100 years earlier (and had done a massive 180 after a human recovered the Kir'shara).  Burnham was seemingly brought up on Vulcan High Command doctrines, the tactical philosophy of a xenophobic Vulcan government run by a violent madman who may have been a Romulan agent.  There's a genocidal war on with the Klingons for no clear reason, and Starfleet enlists the aid of a fascist despot from an alternate reality to destroy the Klingon homeworld.

Even the normal Star Trek progressive themes break down hard here.  Our black protagonist happens to be a convict serving a life sentence for assault, mutiny, and committing an act of war based on racist motives.  The British captain?  He's evil.  No, LITERALLY EVIL.  One half of the gay couple is killed off fairly swiftly, and comes back in a spore hallucination just to confirm that yes he is really irrevocably dead.  The Arabic member of the crew seems to be trying to win a game of racist bingo by really being, in no particular order: an illegal immigrant using a fake identity, a violent religious fanatic, and a genocidal terrorist seeking to start a holy war.

 

All these setting-related problems could've been fixed with one simple change: set this sh*t during the Earth-Romulan War of 2155-2160.  Nobody knew what a Romulan looked like, so that Ash Tylor bullshit could've been left on the cutting room floor.  That was an actual, very bitterly fought war where whole planets were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, Vulcans were still explicitly kinda dicks and even leave Earth in the lurch during the war, Starfleet's ships were being destroyed left and right, plenty of morally questionable choices by Starfleet like the infamous Kobayashi Maru situation...

 

Instead, the Mirror Universe arc basically annihilated any pretense of writing or any kind of character development.  It's an attempt to make the proto-fascist Federation in Discovery look better by showing an actual fascist dictatorship in the Mirror Universe.  The problem is that by revealing that Lorca wasn't a conflicted, morally ambiguous man caught in a difficult position, and instead was just a card-carrying saturday morning cartoon villain, it obliterated anything resembling an arc.  Burnham's not really a good person, actual-chaotic-evil Lorca just saw a kindred spirit in a downright terrible Federation Starfleet officer.  Stamets isn't mentally ill, he just got connected to the Mirror Universe by the magical does-anything Spore Drive.

The Spore Drive itself was a terrible idea.  The writers never set any limits on what it can do the way the writers of every previous Star Trek series did on new technologies.  So it became a "new powers as the plot demands" device.  It can travel anywhere in the universe, it can let you speak with the dead, it can give you telepathy, it can travel to alternate realities.  It can probably travel through time too.  The whole thing is just a terrible plot device.

 

[Stampeed Valkyrie]

I just caught upto Ep 10..   Not clicking any spoilers.. lol

This series started meh.. and then actually got good, and now its sliding back to meh again.    Will try and watch 11-14 this weekend.

 

And on a side note.. what the hell us up with Ads when you pay for a service?   annoying as F*** why pay for a subscription just to be forced through sh*tty ads!  and btw I am not paying for CBS all access.. lol

 

[kajnrig]

Yeah, I got the free trial yesterday and canceled the subscription right away, too. Just gonna binge this show, then peace out of this "limited ads" nonsense.

[Dynaman]

Ads - not really all that different from paying for cable and still watching ads.  Not saying I like either system(*) mind you.  (*) Cable or this all access nonsense.

[Chronocidal]

On ‎2‎/‎10‎/‎2018 at 2:36 PM, Dynaman said:

Ads - not really all that different from paying for cable and still watching ads.  Not saying I like either system(*) mind you.  (*) Cable or this all access nonsense.

Except that cable companies are selling adspace to whoever ponies up the cash.  Unless I'm mistaken, this should be more like an HBO channel subscription, where the only ads you get are to fill the space between shows, and only advertising what else is on the channel.  You're already buying the channel, what else do they want to sell you?

To interrupt your own show just to advertise what's coming up next is the absolute worst excuse for commercials.

[Dynaman]

And the networks have companies buy ads to, it is a split between them on ad time.  Syfy also has a large number of ads for their own shows on their channel too.  I guess they need to fill in the ad time since the show was meant to run with a number of minutes of advertising and perhaps they could not find any buyers.

[Chronocidal]

9 hours ago, Dynaman said:

And the networks have companies buy ads to, it is a split between them on ad time.  Syfy also has a large number of ads for their own shows on their channel too.  I guess they need to fill in the ad time since the show was meant to run with a number of minutes of advertising and perhaps they could not find any buyers.

Possibly the case, but I don't know since I haven't felt the need to try their free trial yet.

The main example I'm going off of is the model Disney eventually went to when they became a cable channel instead of subscription only.  At some point after the shift, they changed from showing all of the commercials between shows, to showing them as regular interruptions to content.  It never changed the fact that the only commercials on the channel were always just ads for whatever other Disney program was coming on at whatever time later that day or week.

I guess I'm curious what format the ads on CBSAA actually follow.  If they're actually selling ad space for outside marketing, and companies are buying into it, ok, I can understand it to a point.  But if all they're advertising is programming on CBSAA?  It's a subscription.  You already have their money up front.  If you're worried about convincing people to continue paying up front, I'd suspect you'd have a lot more success with not interrupting the content with pleas for people to keep sending them more money.  Odds are, if they signed up for your service, they already researched what you're showing them, or they wouldn't have forked over the cash for it in the first place.