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## Syndication: The Second Audience
The entry of *Star Trek* into syndication in 1969, almost immediately after NBC’s cancellation, is the event that separates the show’s original broadcast history from its cultural history.
Syndication in American television works through a market in which individual stations — both network affiliates and independent stations — purchase the rights to broadcast episodes of completed series. The price depends on the show’s perceived value, its episode count, and the size of the market. For a studio like Desilu/Paramount, which owned the episodes, syndication represented the eventual payoff for the deficit financing absorbed during original production.
*Star Trek* entered syndication at a time when independent television stations were proliferating. The all-channel television receivers required by federal regulation since 1964 meant that viewers could now receive UHF stations that had previously been difficult to watch. This expansion of the available channel count created demand for programming that could fill time slots affordably, and completed network series were the standard answer.
The stations that acquired *Star Trek* typically scheduled it in after-school and late-evening time slots — positions that reached the demographic that Nielsen had undercounted during the show’s network run. College students watching in dormitories. Teenagers watching after homework. Young adults watching alone in apartments. These were exactly the people who had been part of *Star Trek’s* network audience but whose viewing had been invisible to the measurement system the network used to make decisions.
The syndicated reruns were, for many viewers, their first encounter with the show. People who had been too young to watch during the original network run, or who had simply missed it, encountered *Star Trek* for the first time in reruns in the early 1970s. The audience that responded was not simply recapturing a nostalgic experience; it was discovering the show as new.