Star Trek to go boldly back onto telly, then beam down in streams

Not entirely sure how I feel about this. On the one hand I love Trek from the original through TNG to DS9, on the other Voyager and Enterprise I'd rather forget. Time will tell I guess, but I can't say the recent movies have done much to give me hope.

Here's hoping my pessimism is misplaced.

Optional

In what way are the subsequent cash-ins er, I mean series reboots? They're no more a reboot of the original series than, say, Aliens is a reboot of Alien.

Questions of the quality of the subsequent series (especially Voyager) are fair enough, but they weren't reboots. They exist in the same Universe with what happened in the preceding series (Enterprise excepted, being a prequel) forming part of that Universe's history*.

^{* Unless rewriting or ignoring history worked for the plot.}

Reboots?

The term "reboot" seems to have changed meaning (or I always misunderstood it), if TNG, DS9, et al are reboots of TOS. I thought a "reboot" is where you pretend the original never happened, so you can re-tell and update the story; for example the 2004 Battle Star Galactica series, or the 2012 Total Recall movie. In my mind, TNG, DS9 etc are sequel series, not reboots; they happen in the same space and timeline as TOS, and even have some characters from TOS appear in them (Spock, R.I.P.).

I believe TNG, DS9, and Voyager had some overlap as well, DS9 started before TNG ended, and Voyager starter before DS9 ended, so it's not as if you could say they were reboots in the sense of restarting something which had stopped.

So, is any spin-off or sequel now a "reboot"?

None of the series quoted are reboots as they all fit within the same universe as TOS. Only the recent movies are reboots (and, as such, should be ignored in anything official).

Also: Subscribing specifically to a series? Not going to work for me unless it's appropriately cheap. Consider that subscribing to the series means "watch it once... then you're done" (or possibly more than once within the subscription period) versus (say) buying something on DVD and watching it whenever I want, and how often I want.

Reboots vs Extended Continuity

Of all the series cited as reboots only Enterprise can really be considered such.

TNG was explicitly a continuation of the timeline, not a reset nor did did it rely on any reset. DS9 and Voyager were also set in that same timeline (excluding those episodes in each of those series that deviated from that timeline for the purposes of weaving in an alternate timeline for unavoidable continuity preservation).

Enterprise, being set before TOS was (more) arguably a reboot for the simple reason that it was difficult to conceive that the technology presented in that earlier timeframe would or could "evolve" to the technology presented in TOS (in a way that was not so problematic for TNG and "later" vs TOS) even if strictly speaking we were supposed to accept that this is precisely what had in fact happened.

Tar Dreck: On borrowed time

I'm inwardly "Squee-ing" like an ante-pubescent schoolgirl upon hearing a group of 30-something "boys" are shortly to appear at my local shopping mall.

Nevertheless I find your attempts to define what is, and is-not a "re-boot" troubling. Budding Jeffrey Albertsons might say that TOS was the first reboot from the pilot. Yes, Captain Pike came back as a parody of Jeffrey Hunter's acting skills in one of Hollywood's earliest ancestors of a "Clip show", but they have markedly different feels.

Similarly one could claim that TNG->DS9->V'GER (With their overlapping run-times) were really just one big show sliced-up as talent-contracts became too expensive.