Everyone should get a $300m fuck-up as a treat.<p>It's actually rather mind-blowing that so much money was invested in such a system. How does that possibly make sense? According to this service [0], CNN has an annual revenue of $190m.<p>Is this some kind of money funneling scheme or an exec's pet project? How do these execs remain so rich after wasting massive amounts of money on projects that seem doomed to fail right from the start? Seeing this makes me wish you could somehow directly short projects of this nature from large companies.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.zippia.com/cnn-careers-17754/revenue/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zippia.com/cnn-careers-17754/revenue/</a>
This got caught up in the Warner Media merger and CNN's executive leaving the company. Warner Media wants CNN to focus on hard journalism, and the CNN+ content of soft shows doesn't really fit with that. Plus, CNN+ never included the CNN cable channel since it would put at risk their main cash cow: distribution agreements to carry CNN. Warner Media wants to have HBO Max to be their big all encompassing streaming service, so I doubt they see a need for a separate CNN+ service anymore. The timing is interesting though, since was launched right before the merger closed. I wonder if the CNN folks just wanted to get this out the door before the new leadership took over. I do give credit to Warner Media execs for killing this early as soon as they decided on long term plans for the combined company.
I was looking forward to CNN+. I wanted an ad-free way to consume the daily news and mindlessly listen to pundits. I think if it was just Anderson Cooper doing this for 20-30 minutes it would've been totally worth the $3/month for people like me.<p>Instead what they delivered was the crap, low effort documentaries they put on to fill gaps in their airtime. Reruns of Anthony Bourdain, weak medical information from Sanjay Gupta, and more social justice than you can shake a stick at.<p>How on earth did they waste $300m on this? Anderson Cooper 360 with no ads is all they needed.
A joint venture with Fox News where every 15min they switch between liberal and conservative pundits would have been interesting. Imagine the drama when folks get up for a drink, come back, and sit down to somebody saying the polar opposite of what the person before had been saying. I'd pay to watch people watch that, just to see their heads explode.
I give them credit for trying and failing quickly.<p>I personally don't see how it was ever going to work, but it's not my business and I don't know what I'm talking about. They clearly thought they had a chance, tried it, saw it flop, and are willing to quickly admit the mistake and stop the bleeding. You can't succeed if you're not willing to fail.
Good riddance. CNN has declined precipitously in general quality, in the last couple of years, and CNN+ was really only a "Get your pure and refined poo, here."<p>Def not worth it.<p>BTW: This has nothing to do with perceived (or actual) political bent. I just feel like they threw all pretense of restraint to the wind, and I couldn't trust them; even a little bit.
If there was a news bundle app: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, etc. I think that would do fairly well in the long run. I know it would send me over the edge and make me feel better about getting rid of cable.<p>I think almost no one with cable is looking for more talking heads. Since the back catalog has a value of effectively zero their main audience has to be cord cutters. I do think that would work for CNN+ eventually but it would probably take years to get to scale.<p>In general though: Single network news subscriptions like this encourage behavior that is a net negative for society. Right now it's hard enough to convince people to change the channel and step out of their bubble to form their own opinions. The last thing society needs is for everyone to only have access to one news channel. Especially one where the viewer is a direct customer as it's only going to encourage these stations to give the viewers more and more of the opinions they already agree with. This will just make people even more opinionated which then drives our politicians to continue down this path of zero compromise and zero legislative productivity.
My understanding is the old guard launched as the new guard (Discovery-Warner: <a href="http://cnn.com/2022/04/08/media/discovery-warner-media-merger-close" rel="nofollow">http://cnn.com/2022/04/08/media/discovery-warner-media-merge...</a>) was taking over. Probably should have waited to see how the new management wanted to play it, but likely the new team didn't have much say before everything closed. If I was to guess they are pulling it now because the numbers are terrible, but more importantly it needs to be rethought to fit into an HBO Max + Discovery + CNN mega service.
I'm sorry, this is a dumb comment.... but every time I hear "plus" after a streaming service (CNN+, Disney+, Paramount+, etc...) - all I can think of is <i>"Grape Juice Plus"</i><p>Edit: Wow, didn't expect the down votes, but okay. Grape Juice Plus is a reference to Planet of the Apes - specifically, the 3rd movie in the sequence - the 1971 movie "<i>Escape from the Planet of the Apes</i>". When Zira tries wine for the first time and asks "what is this?", instead of saying "wine", they say "that's, uh, grape juice plus". For whatever silly reason, that scene always stuck with me.
The first I heard of CNN+ was in the context of how badly it was failing. I'm pretty immersed in the internet and our household collectively has 3 or so streaming services.<p>It seems to me as if there advertising about the service did not effectively target the key demographics.
I don’t live in the US and when I saw this article I told my wife that CNN tried streaming and asked her to guess what they called it, she got it right first guess.<p>I find the choice of the + suffix on almost all streaming services both highly bizarre and mildly amusing.
CNN is not about news, it is about opinionated hosts and guests, i.e.: not journalism.<p>Journalism is about reporting events, not interpreting them. Tell me what happened, not what you think about it.
Yet another Scott Galloway prediction that went sideways: <a href="https://marker.medium.com/how-cnn-can-save-itself-16a854f4d865" rel="nofollow">https://marker.medium.com/how-cnn-can-save-itself-16a854f4d8...</a>
A complete and stunning failure. Less than a month after launch, another mainstream media product has struggled to take off and has been shut down.<p>One of the biggest launch failures since Quibi, but again very unsurprising that it was shut down so quickly.
This seems more like cost-cutting; the new WarnerMedia/CNN/Discovery entity doesn't want competing streaming services.<p>I'd imagine all of CNN and WarnerMedia programming moving onto Discovery+ shortly and that killing this division was part of "synergies".<p>Doesn't mean CNN+ was a roaring success, but it's just not enough time to tell if it was a flop.
They should settle for licensing out their content to other streaming services.<p>I have no idea why they insisted on wasting so much money launching a service 5 years after everyone else.
It’s fascinating how many big failures like this happen before I’ve heard of the product. I spend a lot of time reading the news (NYTimes, SFChronicle, Twitter, HN, etc.), so I don’t think I’m somehow clueless. The first I heard of CNN+ was after the shutdown decision. Perhaps they didn’t bother to market and advertise this properly. I couldn’t get away from Disney+ or Apple TV+ ads before and after they launched.
"This is not a decision about quality; we appreciate all of the work, ambition and creativity that went into building CNN+, an organization with terrific talent and compelling programming"<p>That is pure comedy.<p>The reason why consumers said 'no thanks' is because CNN's propaganda is known partisan trash and not journalism, nor is it even remotely compelling for anyone short of those who sit to the left of Chairman Mao.
I am a bit sad to see this as I was excited about CNN's library of excellent documentaries and past shows such as Parts Unknown and The Wonder List etc being available on CNN+. I also liked Chris Wallace's interviews with various personalities. I just hope that CNN+ content can be available when WB+Discovery(+CNN?) service launches.
That was quick. I read an article about three weeks ago about Chris Wallace "looking forward" to his new show on CNN+. They also had Audie Cornish signed up! Wow.
I really can't believe a group of people sat around and gave the green light to this thing from the start. It seems like such a bad idea from and before the start.
I heard that CNN+ had fewer viewers than small Indy news people on YouTube.<p>Except for Democracy Now and (sort of) PBS, I am so disappointed by the main news corporations. I remember when the news covered multiple points of view and was generally interesting.<p>I am also tired of most of the small independent news bloggers, YouTubers, etc. because they suffer from the same illness: talking to their own bubble.
I don't know why anyone watches tv news of any kind in the first place, it's uniformly shallow, reactive and ignorant. And biased. Even with "breaking" events I'd rather wait for the papers, though most of those are also terrible.<p>Of course, these channels and papers find audiences, so clearly the market doesn't agree with me. Sigh.
The real question is what they thought would happen. Launching a for-pay venue hosting the same people hosting the same type of content which has driven their viewership into the ground on cable - or, to be more precise, on airports all over the western hemisphere since that was about the only place most people ever were exposed to CNN - was a sure-fire recipe for failure. Those who planned this and executed upon those plans were either desperate or so wrapped up in their own bubble that they could not see the reality of CNN having lost nearly all credibility.
I would love a high quality subscriber news services not pressured to pander to advertisers or lowest common denominator mass tastes. But CNN (or Fox, not picking sides here) are utterly unqualified to provide such a service. I would gladly pay for full BBC content to be available in US without any shenanigans. Even though being funded by the government is normally not great news, maybe still better than being funded by rabid base of a single political party plus pharma companies selling drugs to old people?
Their top show gets around 700,000 viewers per day.<p>That's around the same as The Deadliest Catch: Bloodlines, a spin-off of the original The Deadliest Catch, which has more viewers.
CNN+ was a stupid endeavor knowing that the ultimate goal was always going to have to be consolidation of streaming services. People don't want to have to subscribe to Discovery+ AND HBOMax AND CNN+. Raise the price by a few bucks and throw it all under one umbrella so that people are less likely to cancel from month to month. These are people with business degrees and they can't figure this out.
CNN is the one the last few bastions of democracy. CNN has played crucial role against racist xenophobic republicans. CNN thwarted the propaganda effort by the racist republicans that COVID came from China. WHO investigation has found that COVID most likely came from outside China. I hope CNN cable would still go on strongly in its effort to shutdown conspuracy peddling republicans.
CNN+ required you to sign in with a cable provider to get the “real” CNN stuff that people were interested in (pundits). When will the corporate fat cats learn that this makes your service DOA? People that sign up for streaming services generally hate cable and despise the industry so blocking your main market from your own service is boneheaded beyond belief.
Warner Bros Discovery will merge HBO Max, Discovery+ and CNN+<p>(CNN+ was created before WB Discovery merger)<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/warner-bros-shutting-down-cnn-variety-2022-04-21/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/warner-bros-s...</a>
Very interesting. <a href="https://inside.com/business/posts/cnn-looks-doomed-280568" rel="nofollow">https://inside.com/business/posts/cnn-looks-doomed-280568</a>
I can't read whatever WSJ is saying about this because of the paywall, but I under the impression it was a bit more complicated than other comments reveling in the failure of a mass media channel are indicating. AT&T spun off entertainment completely, then Discovery and Warners merged, but that left a single company running HBO Max, CNN+, and Discovery+, which is stupid. I believe they plan to consolidate those into a single service, probably using HBO branding, which is still by far the most reputable out of what they own. I don't think it means CNN content won't stream anywhere.<p>It's inevitable that more events like this will happen. Remember when CBS hilariously "re-merged" with Viacom and CBS All Access rebranded as Paramount+ and swallowed up PlutoTV and Nickelodeon? There wasn't much reason to keep the others around.<p>Peacock and AMC+ stand out right now as having no reason to exist on their own and seem ripe to merge with at least each other and probably with something else, too.
There are too many streaming services, people will only pay a recurring fee for a small number of them. Journalism is probably at the bottom of the priority list for what people would pay for as well, with the plethora of free journalism available online, or the services that workaround paywalls.
They chose terrible timing to launch it.<p>They should have either done it while Trump was in office or whenever Democrats lose the election next time... because that's when their primary audience seems to seek comfort in their stories about how they are in the right and how the opposition are the bad guys.<p>In CNNs defense, they propably planned this with the expectation that Trump would win the second term.
Feels like existential crisis for CNN. Ironically their shrinking rating could be rescued if Trump is seriously making a run for 2nd term.<p>They really changed their identity from an unbiased news source during Trump era, and I think Trump back in the fold could actually help their rating.