High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Star Trek is one of the most culturally influential television shows—and perhaps the most influential science fiction TV series—in history. The original series, which aired in the late 1960s, has since spawned five successor series, eleven movies, a plethora of merchandise, and a multi-billion dollar industry collectively known as the Star Trek franchise (currently owned by CBS Television Studios, which now owns television properties previously held by Paramount Pictures, the studio that produced Star Trek for many decades; CBS Paramount continues to hold DVD rights to the TV series, and the rights to produce feature films).