Paramount Pictures/History with Star Trek/Demise of franchise/prime universe/Asset liquidation

Whether or not the disappointment over the live-action production performances of the last three Star Trek outings, general animosity toward the phenomenon, simple harsh economic realities, or any combination thereof were in play, fact remained, the new owners came at the franchise with a vengeance.
Firstly there was their decision to sell off Paramount's entire warehouses' contents of Star Trek production stock assets in the 2006-2009 40 Years of Star Trek: The Collection, and It's A Wrap! sale and auction wave of auctions, with the exception of those that were still on exhibition tour at the times. While CBS put a positive spin on the decision in wordings that amounted to "graciously allowing" dedicated fans the "wonderful" chance to own a piece of Star Trek history (Star Trek: Beyond the Final Frontier), it did not take a Nobel Prize laureate to realize that the primary reason was CBS' rush to liquidate their Star Trek holdings as quickly as possible, making it abundantly clear that CBS was done with Star Trek as it had been.
There was a certain amount of cynicism involved surrounding the 40 Years of Star Trek: The Collection auction organized by auction house Christie's, as it was presented as the franchise's one of only two official events for Star Treks 40th anniversary. Additional official events were absent, save for employing a barely observed anniversary logo. The contrast with the high profile, highly publicized Hollywood-style gala event for the 30th anniversary, registered as the Star Trek: 30 Years and Beyond documentary, could not have been any greater. To date, the 40th anniversary has been the least celebrated anniversary of all, ever since the franchise started to celebrate these in 1986, having seen the conception of The Next Generation as part of that anniversary.
If there had been any lingering doubt left within Trekdom about the intentions of CBS, that bubble was popped less than a year later when CBS cut the last line of official communications with the outside Star Trek world (Star Trek Communicator, the official fanclub magazine, had folded the year before when publisher Decipher Games gave up its license due to internal issues unrelated to the studio changes) when StarTrek.com was taken off-line, almost overnight, with its entire staff fired on the spot as the result of "restructuring" at CBS Interactive. Over the years a substantial amount of behind-the-scenes production information had been gathered on the site, but CBS has not bothered to make backups of this material and as a result, a valuable cache of information was essentially lost to posterity.
Next up were the former Paramount entertainment parks and attractions that CBS had acquired in the "divorce settlement", with Star Trek: The Experience as one of its flagships. Within the time span of two years all of these were sold to such third parties as Cedar Fair Enterprise, and by 2008 all Star Trek-themed attractions had become defunct.
The print franchise too, enjoyed the scrutiny of the new owners; the number of "official" magazines had already started to dwindle under the previous owner Paramount to just the one, the British Star Trek Magazine, but now CBS went after the foreign language editions that were still in print, as Oliver Denker, the Chief Editor of Star Trek: Das offizielle Magazin (a German language variant of Star Trek Magazine) could attest to. Denker had to renegotiate his license due to the new ownership situation in 2007, only to find out that, much to his dismay, he was unable to and has cited a "mercurial" CBS Consumer Products as the reason for the failed negotiations. Denker had reasons to be dismayed, as the magazine was doing well, since Germany, along with several other European Union nations, enjoyed something of a Star Trek revival due to the syndication phenomenon. Denker was not the only one who found himself in this position, as by 2008, with exception of two GE Fabbri publications, no other foreign language official magazine was still in print, leaving the British magazine the sole "official" survivor. The number of Star Trek books too was whittled down considerably, with Pocket Books ceasing publication of reference books altogether, and the number of new novels reduced to what was essentially a token number only with the majority of 40th anniversary novel releases being cheap reprints. Within two years all Star Trek affiliated editors, most notably, Marco Palmieri and Margaret Clark, were booted out. Remarkably, one successful Pocket Books publication, the Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar series, was as late as 2012 sold to Universe Publishing and Andrews McMeel Publishing.
The prevailing mood was not lost on other merchandise license holders either, and their exodus continued unabated, resulting in a 2006-2008 merchandise drought and a stark contrast with the merchandise situation a decade before. There was a single bright spot in this era however; Art Asylum had only gained a merchandise license at the turn of the millennium, releasing products pertaining to Enterprise at first, and refused to give in to the pursuant general mood, stubbornly continuing to release Star Trek-based models and action figures in a period of time that was virtually devoid of competitors. Art Asylum's faith in the franchise has paid off, as it still holds the prime universe license as of 2016.
There were however two franchise elements that escaped the scrutiny relatively unscathed. The first one was an obvious one as it had always been relatively easy money – syndication. And as a matter of fact, CBS came in at the tail end of what was essentially a syndication bonanza, courtesy the European Union. From the mid-1990s onward, the Union had ordained its member states to liberalize their broadcast landscape. Up until then, almost all European countries traditionally had their respective governments exercise control over the airwaves, but the member states had now committed themselves to allow commercial broadcasters unrestricted access to the airwaves as well. This sparked a boom in the number of channels all over the Union. However, there was in most countries a proviso: in order to retain their broadcast license, a newcomer committed itself to broadcast a daily minimum number of hours. As virtually none of these newcomers had their own production companies yet in place to fill their time slots, a veritable scramble for 1980s-1990s television productions ensued, Hollywood being the most obvious provider of these. With its impressive backlog catalog, Star Trek fitted the initial need for these newcomers perfectly. As a result, the European airwaves were for nearly a decade flooded with Star Trek, in most cases airing on a daily basis. In a country like the Netherlands, for example, which had only aired part of the Original Series in the early 1970s up until then, all spin-off series were now aired on daily basis, sometimes concurrently on different channels. It should be noted that this was at the time a somewhat unusual situation, as all these series had already been made available to the Dutch public through both the rental circuit as well as the home media format market. The minimum broadcast hours proviso has sometimes also led to odd situations; at one point commercial broadcaster Veronica had to air Enterprise in the dead of night, when the country was asleep, to not lose its license. For the most part this situation applied to the other countries as well, but it has also been a part of the reasons why Denker's above-mentioned magazine was doing so well. However, by 2007-2008, the new situation on the European broadcast landscape had settled, with production companies in full swing, providing the commercial broadcasters with their own productions, and the after-market demand for Star Trek has dropped sharply since then, the movies excepted.
The other franchise element that escaped "The Wrath of CBS" unscathed, for partly the same reasons, was the home media format franchise, particularly since it was the dawn of high definition television. In this light the survival of Fabbri's two publications should be considered, as both were a DVD/Magazine combination partwork publication, the DVD element being, quite literally, the saving grace. In effect, it was one of the very few areas, if not the only one, where CBS took affirmative action in that period of time, by commissioning the production of The Original Series remastering project. Favorably received, the remastering project stands out as the single bright spot, in what was otherwise the "Dark Ages" of what once was "The Franchise". Incidentally and somewhat characteristically, CBS gambled on the wrong horse initially when it released the first season of the remastered series in the HD DVD format, the high resolution format that lost out to Blu Ray. Announced on 31 August 2006, the project was the second (and last) of CBS's official events for Star Treks 40th anniversary, and its episodes were first broadcast on television, before being disseminated on home media formats. Contrary to the Christie's auction, this project at least had a positive ring about it, lacking the cynical undertones of the former. Actually, the remastering project conceivably helped to keep Star Trek Magazine afloat, as CBS belatedly realized that they were increasingly left without any official communication channels to promote the project to the very target audience it was intended for; the traditional Star Trek fan base. Publisher Titan Magazines was allowed in late 2006 to launch the magazine in the US – having been devoid of any "official" print publication since 2005 – as well, its contents synchronized with the British source publication.