CNN+ streaming service is shutting down a month after launching | Hacker News Reader

CNN+ streaming service is shutting down a month after launching

wsj.com

298 pointscwwc318 comments

Everyone should get a $300m fuck-up as a treat.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.zippia.com/cnn-careers-17754/revenue/

190M doesn't pass the sniff test for revenue - as 38k/employee probably doesn't pay their average salary (much less overhead, equipment, travel, etc.). This might be their gross profit though?

Here's a source for $1.7B revenue (sounds more reasonable): https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...

But, your point still stands!

I wonder if they mean net profit. Their number would be around 11% of that 1.7B which seems on point.

I have a hard time understanding how it can cost $300M to stand-up a platform like that. Like where are they spending their money? Can someone in this space enlighten me about how this kind of stuff is so expensive. It it just all about contracts and broadcast rights?

I assume much of the money was for original content. There's a $100B+ bubble in original streaming content going on right now.

That's not a bubble. The film and television business has always been huge, and consumers pay to watch it. It's not even clear there's been any increase in real terms. There might be a shift to streaming, but the industry size has remained relatively constant in real terms.

The supply of content has exploded by several orders of magnitude. Much of it is totally free. Heck, some evenings I pause a show and find myself having spent 2 hours scrolling tiktok.

Video IP is drastically overpriced right now, and its never going to return to 1990's levels of cultural dominance.

> The supply of content has exploded by several orders of magnitude. Much of it is totally free. Heck, some evenings I pause a show and find myself having spent 2 hours scrolling tiktok.

i'm of the opinion that a big reason for this is while quantity has gone up, quality has plummeted. if you were watching something interesting/worthwhile, you would have been less likely to find tiktok more interesting than the crap on netflix.

IMHO, a little of column A and a little of column B. It's happening from both sides.

As quantity goes up, cultural relevance of any particular single show goes down.

Thus it becomes harder to run a platform on "one" hit, thus everyone turns to the Netflix model of a billion micro-targeted shows, thus demand for content becomes a series of niche requirements, and anything actually creative has to percolate through them (a la Joker's "Sure, I'm a superhero movie" or La Casa de Papel's "Sure, I'm a Spanish Ocean's Eleven" or Dark's "Sure, I'm a German Stranger Things").

That's hard, and so what you actually get for the majority of content is the media equivalent of a box of Crayola crayons -- 256 different colors, with zero depth under the surface.

My takeaway is that with so many different alternatives, its becoming decreasingly economically rational to produce series/film. The budget of the series I was watching was almost certainly 100x+ the budget of the random people on tiktok I was scrolling past, collectively.

>i'm of the opinion that a big reason for this is while quantity has gone up, quality has plummeted.

Two dudes with a couple middling cameras and a tripod can shoot stuff that passes for professional.

Look at the big YouTube channels. They're as good or better than reality TV ever was.

Netflix has spent years borrowing more money than it makes to produce and obtain content.

The other major streaming services outside of Apple and Amazon can take advantage of the “flywheel” where they can make money on the same content multiple ways - syndication, video on demand, theatres etc.

Zucker was trying to spend big to get into the streaming space. For example, poaching Kasie Hunt...

"CNN is trying to hire dozens of people to help fuel its move into the streaming arena, and one person familiar with the matter said Hunt was offered an annual salary of between $1 million and $1.5 million that NBC News felt it simply could not match. This person suggested that Hunt could play a pivotal role in CNN’s streaming efforts, appearing online at moments of great national importance, such as during presidential elections."

https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/kasie-hunt-departure-nbc-ne...

Signaling maybe? When Fox was becoming the 4th TV network, they massively overpayed for NFL football, but it sent the message to affiliates that they were serious and not half-assing it.

The signaling theory doesn’t necessarily translate to a consumer subscribers, but maybe to other industry players.

I think there's probably some insight in this quote from the article:

>"CNN wooed big-name talent, including Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, to join the service."

It's probably less a tech spend and more of on-air talent and content spend. I believe they already had a streaming app so presumably they would have leveraged that existing work. This being said it is still an eye-popping sum for an entry into an already overcrowded market.

It’s insane to me that companies keep paying ex-Fox-talent to go mainstream. That’s like paying porn actors to make the jump to non-porn media: the skill sets required and reputation needed are just different. There are a few exceptions on both sides, but (sorry not sorry) Chris Wallace is not his father, and can never be his father.

Mike Wallace was sui generis and very much hard journalism . There's a actually good documentary on him called "Mike Walllace is Here."

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3821321241

I suspect most of these people don't really hate each other as much as they pretend on TV. That goes for politicians too. There are exceptions I'm sure.

Evidently Andy Rooney's kids are/were also involved in TV news to varying degrees, although I don't think any of them tried to market themselves in such a way that subscribers could hear about little things about daily life that annoyed each of them. 60 Minutes reputations clearly aren't hereditary.

They probably cut market research funding to obtain that $300M.

They retained McKinsey to forecast adoption, bet that wasn't cheap.

Inverse to the number of subs

Marketing spend was a big part.

really ineffective marketing spend if you ask me. I watched a fair amount of CNN during the early phases of the Ukraine war and I would be hard pressed to tell you what shows CNN+ offered that were compelling enough to justify yet another streaming subscription. I vaguely know Chris Wallace had a show but I think I learned that from a NYTimes profile, not any of CNN's marketing.

The problem with modern CNN is that it learned the wrong lessons from Fox: market personalities and mix opinion with news.

CNN was at its best when it had none of that. What was interesting was live reports from Baghdad as AA lit up the sky, not anyone's opinion or the name attached. You know, what used to be called "news".

Thankfully, the new CEO seems to agree.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/david-zaslav-wants-to-distingui...

Hopefully it's not all just puffery.

Incredibly ineffective marketing spend - the first time I heard of CNN+ was all the "CNN+ is completely dead" articles.

Same here and it launched as I was making a transition from hard left to hard right and moving from an urban area to a suburban area so I should have been in pretty much every group you could possibly target (except maybe people who watch CNN?)

... what constitutes hard right?

You can look through my comment history but I self censor to avoid getting banned. Also my username is an acronym. You're welcome to try expanding it.

Of which, a lot was probably spent on their own in-house platforms.

Marketing and talent. They probably had to give Chris Wallace and Audie Cornish multi-year commitments to spend their reputation on a risky venture.

Did they actually SPEND the capital, or just set it aside? Even if they were going around filling DC's with transcoders I feel like they'd have a hard time spending $300M that fast, unless they grossly overestimated the size of their audience.

Advances for talent; that is likely a good chunk of it.

That revenue figure seems wildly inaccurate. Pew (via a third party research firm) estimates CNNs 2020 revenue at $1.7B:

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...

hey this is ATT we are talking about(CNN's parent owner), they paid $85B for Warner bros in 2018, and really haven't seen much a return on their investment with Game of Thrones winding down, the new matrix movie being horrible, and then spun it off for half its value ($43B). Lets then look into directv the other dud that ATT bought for $67B and spun it off a few years later into a $16.25B standalone company. For those who are keeping count thats $92B lost in the matter of a few years which is astonishing!

CNN itself is a deeply troubled network, its old CEO(Zucker) had to step down due to sleeping around with a direct report, Chris Cuomo (a cnn exec)was fired for helping out his brother(the Gov. of NY) escape sexual assault allegations, another top CNN producer(John Griffin) was arrested(and fired) on child molestation charges. In addition to all that the viewership is sinking like a rock so its not surprising that CNN+ was dropped so quickly.

> Is this some kind of money funneling scheme or an exec's pet project?

Nearly every large scale institutional / bureaucratic initiative is a money funneling scheme. It doesn’t cost 300M to get a streaming service off the ground. Execs and middle managers all the way down figure out some way to inflate the budget and redirect it in ways that will profit them. It’s worse in government, exorbitant amounts of tax money is extracted as profit.

It is pretty amazing, when you see it in raw numbers.

You might be onto something. I work in a very different industry, but I recently found out I am part of two separate projects championed by different executive teams with two different vendors working on the same solution. Pet projects are a time honored tradition of executives since time immemorial.

I do not accept the possibility it is a mistake. It is some weird corporate politics that is way above my pay grade.

> It is some weird corporate politics that is way above my pay grade.

If you looked into these things you’d see it’s very much below your pay grade.

Money laundering? Shareholder lawsuit bringing in a forensic accountant would be interesting.

Probably similar to Hollywood accounting where even a massive loss is just used to avoid paying taxes on profits in other places. Big companies really can't lose

Because there is no tangible accountability once you reach the executive level. The worst you get is a golden parachute wide enough to retire 50 normies.

Google is like “hold my beer”.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

How much money does Google waste on products that are vanity projects so engineers can show “impact” and “scope” that get killed within a year?

As a Google enthusiast, I appreciate the comprehensiveness of that list, but what it includes is ridiculous. A toy watch face app ("Together") doesn't belong in the same list as Google Reader.

I don't think I saw anything on that list that cost $300 million and was killed after a month.

Wouldn’t it be better to kill something fast instead of letting it linger after people are counting on it?

But then again, CNN didn’t abandon a project that ruined streets throughout an entire city..

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18381466/google-fiber-lou...

No but Google+ cost billions and was killed too late

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.

> CNN+ never included the CNN cable channel

This is the full stop. Leave it to a bunch of suits to come up with a dairy subscription that doesn't come with milk.

This is kind of hilarious. who was cnn+ even supposed to be for? I personally like CNN, and would probably pay <$x/month or something to get it unbundled. But no way would I ever pay for "cnn+" that doesn't even have cnn!

There are some Disney shows you can't find on Disney+; but the majority of what you think of as "Disney" is there. But trying to have CNN+ not even include CNN is a huge branding error at best.

It's worth pointing out the reasoning: the bigger factor is the exclusivity that the cable providers get for carrying CNN. The cable providers don't want you dropping them because you can get CNN elsewhere, and CNN doesn't want cable providers to think about dropping the channel because customers can get it elsewhere.

which is why there should not have been a cnn+ to begin with. they couldnt offer the only service of theirs that people are paying for

These people are not clever. Their calculations are apparent if you allow for sufficient sleaziness. CNN+ made sense back when Jeff Zucker was to be the man behind the throne of the Cuomo presidency. CNN+ would then have had the access to stay relevant as YouTube and Netflix ate up cable and satellite. Probably would have panned out if De Blasio hadn’t continuously sucked the oxygen out of the entire state for short-lived ego points. BLM was meant to be Cuomo’s road to the White House, not a city crosswalk, stupid bastard.

Exactly. It was doomed to fail and it sounds like everyone knew it (or they were hoping to make it into a life raft for when the cable companies collapsed).

>they were hoping to make it into a life raft for when the cable companies collapsed

interesting point. maybe there was some benefit to building the cnn+ infrastructure prior to their merger, and they did it because they figure they'll need it eventually

ESPN+ is the the same way. It has "ESPN exclusives," but only niche-tier live sports broadcasting that couldn't make it to the cable-only ESPN channels.

Sure but the "niche-tier" live sports are very valuable their audience, which cannot be said of the CNN+ content. ESPN+ is very popular in my social circle to watch college baseball, womens' sports, some MLS and European soccer, and more obscure games in the big college leagues.

Not only is there no alternative for this content, it was unavailable entirely before ESPN+ launched. Of course I'm not defending the lack of cable ESPN content on ESPN+; I would love to have that as well.

ESPN+ is so annoying. It used to be that you could watch anything streaming but not broadcast on cable with a cable login, but they moved most of that content to ESPN+. For example in the early Australian Open rounds you could watch matches on smaller courts with a cable login, but now you have to pay for ESPN+ for this even if you have a cable login.

Back in the day, CNN was a new thing, it was kind of amazing. There was just news when you needed it or wanted it. Then somehow it became a brand. HLN was supposed to just loop the top stories every 30 minutes, you know Head Line News... Somewhere, between the politically targeted "news" market and streaming, it's a shell. Maybe worse than a shell, "CNN" and "HLN" are literally just brands now, to the top decision makers it's a channel with a pool of viewers, they could give a shit about actual content.

The irony of all of this is that I think a lot of people would pay a few bucks a month for a real hard news streaming service. I could even imagine some sort of a package deal where like the NYT or some other top shelf paper worked with such a new service and you could get both as a package. Ironically, or maybe not, the pay per household model of how carriers pay for the content has really driven the lowest common denominator and as more people pull out of cable, it's actually strengthening the Fox like market share. During lunch here at home, I'd love a 15 minute quick hit of news and the market as I make a sandwich and eat it.

>real hard news streaming service

patreon for Channel 5 and a handful of super-independent instagram war photographers like Finn Depacier. Hasn't congealed into a product yet, but it will.

Exactly. I signed up since they said "live" a few times but what they mean by live is, a few pre-recorded live shows that you can watch VOD.

That’s exactly what happened:

“The decision puts an abrupt end to an ambitious and aggressive venture that people familiar with the matter say rankled David Zaslav, the new CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, from the start. Zaslav was annoyed by the decision of Jason Kilar, the former CEO of WarnerMedia when it was owned by AT&T, to launch CNN+ just weeks before Discovery was set to take over operations. But he was unable to communicate with WarnerMedia management, owing to legal boundaries surrounding the merger process.”

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/cnn-plus-shut-down-warner-b...

> Warner Media wants CNN to focus on hard journalism, and the CNN+ content of soft shows doesn't really fit with that.

Specifically, it doesn't fit the CNN brand vision. Discovery already has lots of brands (with various niches) tied to non-news documentary and infotainment content.

> Warner Media wants CNN to focus on hard journalism

Wait may we actually see some positive change come out of this nonsense?

They can focus on hard journalism or they can be profitable but they can't do both. Fox is incredibly successful and charges many times higher rates for cable carriage but running a fine-tuned outrage machine.

> They can focus on hard journalism or they can be profitable but they can't do both.

I'm not sure that's true. When everything we consume all day is from rage machines, some hard journalism would be very, very welcome. Just a display of sensibleness would be rejuvenating, no matter what they were reporting.

Rage machines were once the new, exciting thing. Now, I think many if not most are worn out.

That's your opinion but it's not the majority opinion. Like I mentioned, Fox is not only the most profitable news org, they have growing competition who are even less ethical. We could have been elevating NPR or the New Yorker this whole time but it hasn't happened.

> That's your opinion but it's not the majority opinion.

In business, the majority opinion doesn't matter. In fact, if the majority agrees with you, you are too late to the market.

> We could have been elevating NPR or the New Yorker this whole time but it hasn't happened.

The New Yorker has an intellectual hurdle and mostly isn't hard journalism. NPR has its own limitations, including lack of a cable news channel.

> Warner Media wants CNN to focus on hard journalism

Where can I read more about that? It would be fantastic! Imagine a Walter Cronkite in this day and age; my completey amateur guess is that it would be enormously popular. Just imagine watching news without the stressors of constant emotional assaults (try PBS's News Hour for an idea of that alternate reality). But very possibly I'm projecting my fantasy of 'hard journalism' onto Warner Media's concept.

I dunno, by that metric you might expect “not using social media” to be enormously popular.

What I want to know is: are they ever going to release any of the original content? E.g., Land of the Giants: https://plus.cnn.com/plus/title-2244411

Warner/Discovery already has at least two streaming platforms, so it's a pretty good bet that all the CNN+ content will show up somewhere.

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.

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.

How on earth did they waste $300m on this? Anderson Cooper 360 with no ads is all they needed.

>Anderson Cooper 360 with no ads is all they needed.

To each his own, I wouldn't watch that even if THEY paid me for it. Also, the market has spoken ...

> the market has spoken

No because "Anderson Cooper 360 without ads" isn't what they put on there, they put on the documentaries—not the pundits. Perhaps you don't like the pundits but the average CNN viewer does and I think might willing to pay $3/month for it.

In fact I was surprised that paying for CNN+ I couldn't even watch Anderson Cooper 360 with ads! All you get is a 10-minute per day preview live stream of CNN unless you can "login through your cable provider".

Sounds a classic case of innovator's dilemma. The "classic" CNN simply wouldn't let CNN+ have all the resource they needed for that would hurt the cash cow of the "classic" CNN.

>the average CNN viewer does and I think might willing to pay $3/month for it

No, that didn't happen, see [1]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111276

Their point is that the average CNN viewer might be willing to pay for a service with different content. CNN+ did not serve the content they were referring to, so your flippant footnote does not apply.

Well the market has spoken, you're right, Anderson Cooper (as far as I know) is a very popular show. It just also spoke in this specific context.

I don't really care for CNN much either way, but every once in awhile somehow I get the "right" CNN International channel/vibe/show and it feels like what I thought international journalism should be.

> Anderson Cooper (as far as I know) is a very popular show

No, it's not a very popular show. Anderson Cooper is last amongst the three major primetime cable news shows. For example, for the week ending March 30th at the 8 PM slot you have (Total Viewers in thousands) [0]:

Tucker Carlson Tonight: 3676

All In W/ Chris Hayes: 1445

Anderson Cooper 360: 890

Now keep in mind that >300,000,000 people live in the United States. So, not that many people are watching cable news to begin with. And definitely not that many young people who may subscribe to a streaming service instead of cable. I don't think there is any sizable market for a streaming service of Anderson Cooper.

0: https://www.mediaite.com/daily-ratings/cable-news-ratings-we...

It seems pretty popular to me. You're misconstruing "that's popular and people watch it" for "I agree with what the person is saying".

Many people watch it. It makes money. Anderson Cooper makes money. Ergo the market is speaking quite clearly.

For example, as vile, absolutely stupid, and wrong as Tucker Carlson is, the market is clearly speaking and he's quite popular.

Now if you want to change your definition or raise your bar or something, sure go for it, but without any parameters I think anyone on prime time on CNN or any major news channel is by definition popular.

> You're misconstruing "that's popular and people watch it" for "I agree with what the person is saying".

Not at all. I just cited some statistics. Making a value judgement is actually what you did:

> For example, as vile, absolutely stupid, and wrong as Tucker Carlson is, the market is clearly speaking and he's quite popular.

The first definition of popular is “regarded with favor, approval, or affection by people in general”

The key word being the last one in this case “general.” Based on the statistics I cited cable news is a niche to begin with. And based on his viewership, Anderson Cooper is a niche within a niche. Not “generally” popular.

For the record I don’t watch any of these shows so I don’t have a horse in this race. Not sure why you feel you need to defend Anderson Cooper’s (non) popularity so hard? It’s certainly not a very popular show as you originally stated. But you’ve since lowered the bar that anything on mainstream cable is “popular.”

I made a value judgement to demonstrate the ability to separate preference from fact. Maybe I didn’t need to do that, but if I can get in a swipe at Tucker Carlson I’ll take it, because he is despicable and vile.

I’m not defending Anderson Cooper. Don’t care about him. To say he’s unpopular though without defining popularity is a mistake you are making, not me. Even if we used your definition here, which we weren’t, it would still be true that he’s popular. He’s a household name. He’s clearly popular. We are talking about him right here. What more proof do you need?

So back to the original discussion regarding Anderson Cooper, the market has spoken. He’s popular. To say the market hasn’t spoken would be incorrect, given he’s on Prime Time on CNN lol.

So what exact point were you trying to make here? Because I think you’re just arguing to argue and it’s really not a good use of time for you or me.

Joe Rogan is far more popular and it’s free.

I'm not following your point

Anderson Cooper is 25th in the 8/9pm time slot with 1.25 million viewers on average. Tucker is 1st with 3.25 million.

Yes, there are a lot of people whose identity is totally wrapped around politics. Got to Twitter. There are people who would spend hours on Twitter engaging in toxic fights with random people on internet.

This is the reason I think reality TV shows have some utility for society. At least it lets people engage in something that is less harmful and less toxic than the Twitter culture war. It's better for society if people spend time on reality TV shows than Twitter culture war.

> Anderson Cooper 360 with no ads is all they needed.

That would be a good way to get a little money from streaming and lose a lot of money from cable distribution, not a net win. There's a reason none of the news networks whose owners have streaming services do that with their big-draw cable news programs.

Their cable ratings are down 70%[0] in a year. That baby should be tossed right out with the bathwater if they want a future.

0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2022/02/21/cnns-rat...

That’s not a collapse, it’s a right-sizing. TV news and CNN in particular got a ratings boost during the Trump administration and a huge bump during the 2020 election. The numbers they have now are around where they were in 2015. IMO it doesn’t suggest terminal decline. A headline like that doesn’t get as many clicks, though.

The ads on all of the cable news channels indicate that their audience is rapidly aging. These channels have become background noise for nursing homes.

not sure how hundreds of people and millions of dollars spent to produce content that gets the views of a mildly popular bedroom YouTuber doesn't suggest "terminal decline."

Well an entire generation of people aren't watching those big-draw cable news programs so status quo thinking = eventual death. Not that they can't pivot when it's really necessary, seems like Disney made the switch at near the optimal time for example, but it's gonna have to happen some day.

>an ad-free way to consume the daily news

What is the appeal to pay for TV news, both with your time and your money?

Online news, from various sources, with an ad-blocker isn't sufficient?

I don't watch CNN in the same way I read WSJ. CNN is mostly just entertainment watching people argue with some news and information. I don't consider it high-brow at all.

I put it on in the background while I'm doing something else for mindless entertainment. In my experience this is how most people watch CNN. I don't think people sit down to watch it like they do a film. I certainly don't, neither does my family.

I quit subscribing to cable because I was tired of the endless repetitive ads for hair loss pills that came on every 10 minutes. Get rid of that and I'll happily continue consuming their content.

There is a thriving piracy scene on YouTube and somewhat on twitch of CNN, MSNBC, and fox. Tend to have commercials edited out. I'm not quite sure why they are being streamed because almost none of them are monetized or linked up to patreons or anything. Sort by upload date and over twenty minutes

So...with everyone blocking out ads (which I do hate and am pro-ad-blocker), how do journalists get paid? I'd personally rather pay for access to decent journalists (which I do), from numerous different sources. CNN being one of those sources (mainly for Fareed Zakaria, Anderson Cooper, John King, Jake Tapper). I would just personally rather do without the opioid constipation and mesothelioma lawsuit ads.

Just put on NPR.

And when you get bored with the repeats, flip to any college radio or Pacifica Station.

I personally just spend max two minutes on newsasfacts per day to catch up on news.

Why would anyone want to endlessly listen to pundits? You can watch ad-free news on PBS News Hour instead.

How is 20-30 minutes/day "endless"? Especially whilst I'm doing other things? I don't see it much different than reality TV or sports.

how much news do you really need? I ask Google Assistant to "play the news" every morning and it covers the bites from many different sources in around 15 minutes while I'm still half asleep and I'm up to date with everything non-tech for the past day.

It’s kind of an addiction that I had to learn to step away from. Especially when COVID first broke out and you could have dramatic things happen in the span of a few hours. However at the end of the day it’s just entertainment and had little bearing on my life.

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.

It would be funny, but I think this "one foot in a bucket of ice, the other in a bucket of lava" approach to neutrality is part of why political reporting has become so incredibly polarizing. It leads to increasingly extreme outliers being given a platform when they probably would have just been ignored before.

it parallels the US court room. each side going all-in and leaving it to the judge / jury to measure the relevance of whats being said.

Only the news channels dont interact directly in front of the viewer so it's like a courtroom where you only listen to one lawyer talk. You have to go to a different room to hear the other lawyer talk, and they are probably talking about the topics in a different order and with a different kind of focus

This analogy perfectly describes our news outlets.

And then we wonder why people are so ill-informed and lacking nuance in their understanding of issues.

That form of neutrality was mandated by law up until 1987 under the fairness doctrine, so it's unlikely it's responsible for any new trends.

The fairness doctrine produced a lot less polarization, or at least that's the widespread belief.

Jon Stewart wasn't a fan of this style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

It's painful to see how sharp he was back then and then see his current show. Something happened.

AS Jon Stewart points out, a debate show could be great. But that format is not a debate show.

Turns out people don't actually want a debate show. Hard to imagine how any for profit company that tries this ends up with anything different.

This made me laugh out loud. Thanks for that. Perhaps Mike Judge could produce it? Something in the article seems to support just how fungible the CNN and Fox cable news-tainment duopoly is. They increasingly appear to be just two sides of the same news-tainment coin:

>"CNN wooed big-name talent, including Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, to join the service."

In a NYTimes profile from last year Chis Wallace stated:

>"I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox."[1].

It's worth noting that he was at Fox for 18 years. It's amusing to think that his move to the CNN streaming service just happened to coincide with his breaking point after almost two decades. I believe CNN also made an offer to Megan Fox after she exited Fox News.

My impression of CNN the last few years was that they seemed to be they spending an inordinate amount of time talking about whatever outrageous thing a Fox host just said on air. It's all rather dystopian and meta. The article hints that Discovery would like them to focus on hard-jouralism but I can't recall the last time CNN was hard-journalism. The Ted Turner years, the first Gulf war?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/business/media/chris-wall...

It's not a dupoloy at all. Fox cable handily beats CNN and MSNBC in daily ratings. Only thing beating Fox is the mainline broadcast networks' evening news.

I didn't mean an actual economic duopoly, that was sarcasm. I meant a duopoly in the sense of two poles of the political spectrum that each seems to cater to exclusively.

The Ted Turner years were great just generally. https://www.tedsmontanagrill.com/

The switch came with the W administration and the ramp up of conservative rhetoric.

> Perhaps Mike Judge could produce it?

Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

Hannity and Colmes was -supposed- to be that, and it was at times interesting.

It was rather obvious though who the star of the show was supposed to be, and Colmes was rather moderate. The conspiracy theorist in me says they probably handpicked Colmes for that role because he was a rather unattractive guy, and anything Fox can do to make liberals look bad goes.

Colmes hosted one of the few left-leaning, nationally syndicated AM talk radio shows in the 90s. I remember when the show launched, the buzz was "big left/right AM talk shows now square off on TV."

I don't know how old you are, but it really was quite a different world before podcasts, YouTube, etc. The right pretty much dominated talk radio, and there wasn't another "talk" platform around.

Grew up in the 80's and 90's. Yeah, I remember a few. Had an uncle who always had Limbaugh or Harvey on in the background. I guess I didn't know about Colmes as I'd never heard him until I saw him on TV I guess a bit later.

As a kid, and even today, I'm bewildered by the fact it was and is still popular. Why do folks actively seek to listen to things that will make them angry or get them worked up? I guess it sells, but not to me.

Hannity and Colmes look like macho type A and dweeb from central casting - if it was an over-the-top comedy routine, it would be fitting. There's no way that was lost on the show's producers, and thus was intended to some degree.

The entire purpose of opinion news is for people to be fed back their own opinions. Every time someone’s opinion is challenged by “their side” they find another outlet.

The NY Times opinion page is very successful, afaik, and has writers from the entire spectrum. A history I read said that it was created in the 1960s to attract readers, seemingly by publishing controversial opinions.

How many modern day “conservatives” would read the NYT? They started leaving Fox News when they called the election fairly and their journalists started saying that claims of “election fraud” were unfounded. Heck they started calling RedState a sellout until RedState kicked out the NeverTrumpers even people with conservative bona fides.

I’m sure the left would turn against NYT if they started publishing about the silliness of mask mandates in 2022.

I'd love that!

I regularly read 'Real Clear Politics' for just this reason. To see what the zealots on either side of the aisle are saying, and to try to triangulate some sort of truth.

Lock them in a cage with folding chairs and make it pay-per-view.

You might be surprised by how little difference there would be!

I give them credit for trying and failing quickly.

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.

I am torn between "I give them credit for trying and failing quickly" and "How on earth did user/market research not show them this would be the result?" I.e. I would love to know if the latter had been optimistic and disproven by the reality.

>"How on earth did user/market research not show them this would be the result?"

Oh but it did! That's the problem when you pay people a lot of money to find the evidence you tell them you want

Unfortunately, reality does not care about said "studies".

I think this is actually a result of the WarnerMedia / Discover merger. In a different article they say that the new CEO wants to consolidate under a single streaming service. So they are likely just going to move the content into Discovery+ or HBOMax.

They spent 300 million on this and got 18k subscribers. There are single youtubers who have more paying patrons on Patreon than that. Merger or not, CNN+ was never going to crawl, nevermind fly.

It's another example of how disconnected the elites are from reality.

It is an oddly emotionally satisfying rationale and I reflexively agree.

But upon closer examination part of me wonders if this particular project was a victim of creation by committee, where there was only one person, who could make decisions and the rest were well-paid bobbleheads.

I have no doubt marketing did their research ( and as much as I hate ads, marketing people look for how things really are ), it is possible only some pieces filtered up and/or dissenting voices were just drowned out by 'why are you holding us up?' type of responses.

I am obviously speculating here, but elites ( however you define them ) are people too and subject to most of the same issues as most of us.

I like your level-headed take.

Having been in the trenches on a large scale initiative gone awry, my hunch would be the same as yours: the lack of strong/well informed leadership leads to bad decision-making despite all the checkboxes being checked (market research, etc).

In that case, it's easy to blame the "elites" (who certainly do deserve blame). Doing so blindly without deeper reflection is cathartic but not too productive or meaningful. A lot of times, the "elites" are victims of a system bigger than them (established culture, procedures, politics, etc). Spending energy to change said system would IMO be more productive than playing the blame game.

I think you're spot on. CNN, as a company, is not run like a news organization any more. There is a specific objective and the content they produce is designed to influence rather than to inform. The broader market is onto this dynamic. They are selling a very specific product to a specific audience. It turns out that the audience doesn't think it is worth much.

This is another sign that CNN is on life support.

While I personally agree with you, it's also important to note that CNN+ had none of the news content of CNN, apparently...

It's possible it didn't cost that much to develop, or that what they did develop can be used for non-plus products. Might have been deemed worth a small risk.

Most all of these streaming setups are white label of a handful of existing products.

> I give them credit for trying and failing quickly.

What ever happened to 'pivoting' rather than giving up and throwing in the towel?

I don't think any investors would be happy with projects just giving up and losing their money like what had happened to Quibi. The difference is, that the raised money for Quibi was returned back and CNN+ lost. it. all.

Totally giving up even after what happened to Quibi is inexcusable for CNN. It means that they have not learned anything and have admitted to repeating the same mistakes they did and lost more money and shut down quicker than Quibi.

Now they are part of list of the worst launch failures in history. Oh dear.

With only 18k subscribers, trying to salvage that situation with a pivot seems like a manifestation of the sunk costs fallacy to me. 18k is miniscule even by rando on youtube standards.

This wasn't a 1M startup venture that failed.

It was 300M in complete losses. That's a crazy amount of money.

> I give them credit for trying and failing quickly.

They didn't fail, they got a new owner with different brand vision.

Not sure blowing $300M counts as failing quickly.

Exactly. The worst thing you can usually do is stay still. Try and fail, try and succeed, those are good things. Not trying is not good.

Spending a quarter of a billion dollars to fail this bad so quickly is not trying; it is gross incompetence.

I don't believe you can look at that dollar figure alone and decide that.

Right, you also have to look at the embarrassingly low subscribers they got using that dollar figure.

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."

Def not worth it.

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.

They product has indeed gone way down hill with no pretense of neutrality or even civility.

> CNN has declined precipitously in general quality, in the last couple of years

Remember the 2016 campaign, when they covered Zucker's friend Trump 24/7?

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.

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.

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.

That’s not going to happen. They’re all competing entities with different corporate ownerships.

I’ve done some work with a few NBCUniversal brands (Syfy, Bravo, E) and while they’ve gotten more aligned in recent years the individual brands are still competing with each other for eyeballs and these are folks that are under a single corporate umbrella and mostly in the same building (30 Rock).

In theory you could create a YouTube TV for news, or sports only those efforts are non starters. If a provider wants MSNBC they have to negotiate for a whole package of NBCU brands.

We have that in Australia, AU$8/month. https://flashnews.com.au/

The streaming service itself is owned by Streamotion which is owned by Foxtel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxtel

Includes many popular news services (Sky, Fox, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, AlJazeera, NHK etc).

Sling (Sling Blue option, $35/mo) has all of those in Sling Blue except CNBC in which case you'd need the News Extra (Blue) (+$6/mo).

It's called YouTube TV and it's awesome

My understanding is the old guard launched as the new guard (Discovery-Warner: http://cnn.com/2022/04/08/media/discovery-warner-media-merge...) 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.

Exactly this. Everyone here is acting as though CNN+ was a failure as a product, when the real issue is that, in the context of the Warner Media Discovery entity, the new management no longer feels that product is aligned with their corporate strategy.

I think we can expect a lot more of this kind of trimming as the combined organization continues to remove redundant services and programming, etc.

It failed as a product spectacularly. 18k subscribers after your first month and 300M$ is abysmal, below even obscure YouTube channels.

Do you have access to their internal modelling? I don't. I have no idea what they were expecting.

I agree, that seems like a slow start, but that's a single month in a very challenging quarter. Given Netflix, one of the biggest participants in the space, missed their subscriber projections by 2.7M in the first quarter, and are forecasting a further 2.5M contraction, I see a very crowded field where a niche offering should be expected to find a small audience and grow slow.

Regardless, I stand by my claim that commenters are missing the forest for the trees, here, and using this as an opportunity to bash the CNN brand rather than stepping back and looking at the broader context.

> Do you have access to their internal modelling? I don't. I have no idea what they were expecting.

This info is already out there [0] and they were laughably off the mark. They were expecting 2M subs this year and up to 18M in four years, according to McKinsey.

It's funny watching people defending a dying brand. The broader context is that CNN and the rest of cable news has been self-immolating for awhile now and are circling the drain, desperate to remain relevant.

[0] https://www.axios.com/cnn-plus-cuts-warner-brothers-discover...

They brought in less than 50k dollars on a 300 million investment with very high, ongoing operating costs.

> Do you have access to their internal modelling? I don't. I have no idea what they were expecting.

That's pretty rich considering you asserted it did not fail as a product, then demanded this of someone who disagreed with you (and is obviously right).

I did seem to fail as a product though too!

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 "Grape Juice Plus"

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 "Escape from the Planet of the Apes". 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.

Grand opening...grand closing.

There was a time when CNN was real news like the BBC and not a somewhat-centrist entertainment channel.

3/4ths of BBC's funding apparently comes from the license fee every Brit with a TV is charged, and I can't help but think that the only hard-news media that can survive these days is one with a captured income stream.

>3/4ths of BBC's funding apparently comes from the license fee every Brit with a TV is charged

Note that you only have to buy the TV licence if you watch live TV or use the BBC iPlayer streaming service.

PBS seems to do pretty well! As best I can tell, they have virtually no captured income streams (other than people forgetting to cancel their donations).

My understanding may be wrong but I thought the Koch brothers have been heavily bankrolling PBS

> somewhat-centrist

That's hilarious. CNN is about as 'somewhat centrist' as Hugo Chavez.

CNN is very economically conservative, it's just socially (cynically 'performatively') liberal.

Ask your local Bernie bro what coverage was like when he was campaigning for social programs that would materially benefit the lower and middle classes.

This is just a baffling comparison.

I realize it’s hyperbole, but it’s still baffling.

> Capitalists are leftists

> real news like BBC

The BBC is the most biased media channel if you don't count all the rest.

Lately I am enjoying Deutsche Welle in English the most as a non politically biased news source, much more so than BBC.

For European, or international, affairs? Which issues did DW cover more neutrally than the BBC?

What's centrist entertainment?

CNN today is not "somewhat centrist" unless your only bar is MSNBC. Over the past half decade CNN has veered into full blown left wing activism.

I know. I can't turn on CNN for more than 30 seconds without hearing about seizing the means of production from the capitalist ruling class and abolishing commodity production.

There exists more than a “communism to laissez-fairs capitalism” axis when people are talking about right vs left. I don’t think it’s productive to point this out when I think it’s generally understood what they mean in this specific context. In “mainstream” American politics (by which we can define by what appears on television and newspapers”) “left” implies mostly advancing the progressive front on racial and sexual issues, as distinguished from the American right, which would rather stop where we are on those social issues and cut taxes or something. Both of them sometimes play a little lip service to the other issues but not much more, since most other things are dictated by long-term service personnel and/or large mega corporations.

Even that I don’t think should really be thought of as a single axis - though they’re few enough now, there’s reactionaries who see capitalism as the source of all modern ills beginning with a very old ideological tradition that would look down just as much on communism.

If not an intentional lie, this could only be said by someone who has no idea what “left-wing” means.

How would you describe the political leanings of CNN?

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.

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.

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.

Journalism is about reporting events, not interpreting them. Tell me what happened, not what you think about it.

It is actually pretty amazing how quickly they self-imploded their brand reputation the past few years, culminating with the Brian Stelter self-own where he's whining how "they" are the real journalists, not Joe Rogan.

The time when they made a calculated lie and said it was illegal to possess leaked documents of the politician they were carrying water for was really sad too. There's actually countless instances of major deliberate lies and misinformation like this from CNN going back over the years. It's not a recent phenomenon.

Opinionated hosts and guests is the only path to profitability for cable news. Most people read or listen to their news now; TV is for entertainment.

CNN’s problem is that their “personalities” are absolute snore-fests. Fox’s bread and butter are their hosts but they are doing fine for now (cable will die eventually). In the current post-ironic zeitgeist, audiences are drawn to more transgressive discourse. But Don Lemon can’t make hot takes when his audience is Deloitte managers and urban moms (also he’s terminally unfunny).

The left leaning media has become too safe and staid. I think that’s why left sympathetic people are drawn to the new “left” podcasts like Chapo Trap House

Then they can call themselves political commentary, entertainment... not news.

And sit in a sofa instead of a news room.

They do have news segments. Every News org has news sections and opinion sections that are de-lineated. I’m not really a fan (they do have good investigative reporting sometimes) but acting like they are aberration does not make sense

It is the normalization of bad journalism. It is not more acceptable because it is normal.

That’s a good point. On cable the distinction between news and opinion is definitely blurred as compared to a newspaper with a very clear editorial section

First off, this has little to nothing to do with the issue of CNN+ closing, so it smells a lot like flamebait to me... but, assuming this comment was made in good faith:

> Journalism is about reporting events, not interpreting them.

This is a description of an idyllic fantasy world that's never existed.

One can (I think reasonably) argue that the current generation of for-profit news is far more likely to spin the facts according to a predetermined agenda in their never-ending pursuit of viewership and associated profits.

But journalism has never, ever, involved simply "reporting events". Just the decision as to which events to report on is an editorial decision.

It is called journalistic integrity. They do not have it.

Your service as a journalist is to serve as a witness for people that was not there.

Not to take advantage of that situation to persuade people into believing your perspectives.

Sports journalism is the only objective journalism.

Yet another Scott Galloway prediction that went sideways: https://marker.medium.com/how-cnn-can-save-itself-16a854f4d8...

That in itself is worth 300M$. He's wrong about...well, everything. And still adored. I want to know his secret.

I'm not sure what in that article you're arguing he got wrong. He seems to suggest a number of options for CNN, he dismisses the paywall option, and mentions consolidation - which is basically what has happened with WB Disco.

The failure of CNN+ doesn't really tell us much about the future of CNN given where WB Disco is right now.

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.

One of the biggest launch failures since Quibi, but again very unsurprising that it was shut down so quickly.

This sounds like something is changing somewhere, for a company to admit defeat that quickly either indicates there are internal politics at play, or the industry as a whole thinks the streaming pie is drying up fast.

The something that changed was WarnerMedia (CNN's parent company) being bought by Discovery Communications earlier this month. The new people in charge saw what everyone else saw and axed this boondoggle ASAP.

> This sounds like something is changing somewhere

Well, their parent company (Warner Bros. Discovery) just completed a big merger 2 weeks ago.

That makes a lot more sense, the parent company gave them one chance and then was like "er nope".

Quibi lasted for longer than this. I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of the shortest run in recent memory for a service with this much investment behind it

This seems more like cost-cutting; the new WarnerMedia/CNN/Discovery entity doesn't want competing streaming services.

I'd imagine all of CNN and WarnerMedia programming moving onto Discovery+ shortly and that killing this division was part of "synergies".

Doesn't mean CNN+ was a roaring success, but it's just not enough time to tell if it was a flop.

> Doesn't mean CNN+ was a roaring success, but it's just not enough time to tell if it was a flop.

The service CNN+ shutdown quicker than Quibi did and lost even more money per day than them. That is enough time and money to call it a flop. They gave up and called it a month.

It is one of the worst product launches in history since Quibi.

> I'd imagine all of CNN and WarnerMedia programming moving onto Discovery+

I thought the consistent messaging was that the branding of the consolidated streaming service would be HBO Max, not Discovery+.

> Doesn't mean CNN+ was a roaring success, but it's just not enough time to tell if it was a flop.

Yeah, they planned a four year period to profitability with a $1 billion investment over that period, 1 month doesn't tell much of that story (though launching it while the merger was going on and when it was in clear conflict with the incoming brand strategy was an odd choice.)

> Yeah, they planned a four year period to profitability with a $1 billion investment over that period, 1 month doesn't tell much of that story

If they were doing ok-but-not-great after 1 month, I would agree. But their numbers were through the floor, they basically didn't get anybody to join. And it's important that for any media product, the first month is your biggest period of growth, after your biggest launch and marketing push, and before any kind of attrition has set in. If you can't grow your media streaming service in your first month, you're never growing.

They should settle for licensing out their content to other streaming services.

I have no idea why they insisted on wasting so much money launching a service 5 years after everyone else.

If nobody is buying it from the source, how would it have value somewhere else?

CNN+ sign up probably had too much friction, having the content available on hulu / Amazon prime etc seems more attractive IMO.

"The failed service was the brainchild of former CNN president Jeff Zucker"

That really says it all.

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"

That is pure comedy.

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.

And this comment is the kind of empty partisan flamebait that lowers the discourse around here. Can we please have a conversation about this without turning it into a US political food fight? Or am I just too old school to think that's possible?

> sit to the left of Chairman Mao.

What world do you live in? Your caricature would be laughable if wasn't so disconnected with reality.

Fox does pretty well selling partisan product.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

The only news that sells IS partisan trash. We can all call out the "other side" for their trash politics, that's very easy [0]. At the same time, there is no reason to believe that a "both sides" debate is going to be fruitful.

CNN is "team sports" politics. They want people to root for their own team and they want to cover politics like teams scoring points.

I think it's very easy to say that American Politics are very broken, and seem to only become more so. Saying outrageous things is a winning strategy right now. I see two counters to this:

1. Deep Conversations. Sound bytes and social media memes can be very motivating, but cannot help people understand real human experience. Only deep conversations in small groups can really do that. Some long form media can also do this. Unfortunately deep conversations don't sell well and they don't scale well.

2. Acknowledging the real human experiences that inform people's outlook. Every controversy has preset entrenched talking points. I'm not going to bring up an example here, because then the replies would only be about the example. But you can imagine any of the identity politics lightning rods, and you can think of the main talking points. The surface level of these arguments is so well worn and smoothed over that it's hard to remember that people have real experiences related to their point of view, and it's very easy to vilify people who don't agree. Again, it takes real effort to understand where someone else comes from and to disagree with them without invalidating their experiences and feelings. This doesn't sell, and this doesn't scale. No political party rewards this kind of work.

But yes, Fuck the Communist News Network. That's an easy meme to spread.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Is it? Or is it because their best show features a guy who killed himself years ago?

I honestly don't understand the charges that CNN is left leaning. The way people talk about it you'd think it was mother Jones or the young Turks or something.

I'm not surprised this happened. CNN itself is struggling and it's ratings have been dropping.

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.

Is this a record for shortest lived premium service? I feel like it may be...

What was that service that only worked on phones with in-house made 10 minute TV shows? That one was incredibly expensive.

Edit: Quibi

Quibi was launched April 6th, 2020 and dissolved December 1, 2020. It lasted nearly 8 months.

You're right but now I want to calculate losses per day. haha

Quibli burned through 1.75 billion USD. I wonder how much CNN+ lost.

> I want to calculate losses per day.

CNN+ lost $9.3M a day vs Quibi with $5.8M a day. [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1517177312424316929

Development time accounts for more than the time between launch and shutdown.

That's an incredible amount of money to burn. Thanks for looking that up!

So I wonder if they’re laying off a bunch of people who were running CNN+? Where does that money go? Salaries? Marketing?

The article mentions $300m USD to develop CNN+

Was it Quibi?[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi

I'm not sure even Google has abandoned something so quickly. Impressive.

The end of this sort of "news" is near, I believe.

The end of CNN, maybe. Fox News seems to be doing fine. It's wall-to-wall alternate-reality stuff that turns out to be false or deliberately misrepresented, when I give it even a cursory check, but it's doing fine.

You're implying that Fox is special in producing wall-to-wall alternate-reality stuff that turns out to be false or deliberately misrepresented. The reality is that CNN is going down because they have been producing, to use your term, wall-to-wall alternate-reality stuff that turns out to be false or deliberately misrepresented. From Russian Collusion to Hunter Biden's laptop, from uncritically parroting COVID-related panic porn to similarly uncritically parroting race and gender baiting activists and everything in between, CNN is going down because their specific flavour of alternate reality is rapidly going out of vogue. Fox is on the ascendant because they have been railing against whatever CNN (and MSNBC and ABC and CBS and PBS and NPR and the NYT and WaPo and...) pushed forward. If all those latter actors were to disappear Fox would suffer since their brand gains its popularity in part from opposing them.

I was curious about their hunter biden coverage. I don't watch it by heard they did a lot about stuff with China and other countries supposedly in their alternate reality doing deals with him that he may not have reported / paid taxes on etc.

I know WaPo called the claims there was a laptop with dirt a russian misinformation campaign. I think facebook downranked stories about stuff with Hunter Biden as misinformation. I think twitter cancelled the NY Post's twitter account because of this. So the misinformation got shot down.

My problem was (as a max dem donor) I worry that the claims that anything negative about dems is misinformation or an alternate reality means folks might miss some actual problems.

Again, glad to see Hunter was cleared - but eventually someone on the left will do something dicey that will be true, and then you start to lose trust if you call things you don't like misinformation.

Fox is doing something right that is getting folks to watch them.

This is on par with the failed Microsoft Kin phones except that the Kin went 2 months and the servers were kept running for 7 months.

https://archive.ph/Abyy0

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.

Seems to me like an epic swan dive in to the mosh pit right at the moment the crowd parted.

I heard that CNN+ had fewer viewers than small Indy news people on YouTube.

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.

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.

Democracy Now is super left wing, though? I don’t think they cover many points of view.

You are correct about that. PBS tends to have more material with wider diversity.

Still, I donate to both, feel good about supporting them.

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.

Of course, these channels and papers find audiences, so clearly the market doesn't agree with me. Sigh.

Never heard of CNN+ until just now. Odd way to be introduced.

https://archive.ph/Abyy0

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.

That's around the same as The Deadliest Catch: Bloodlines, a spin-off of the original The Deadliest Catch, which has more viewers.

Their views are too extreme, a bit like Fox, but the opposite.

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+

(CNN+ was created before WB Discovery merger)

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/warner-bros-s...

Very interesting. https://inside.com/business/posts/cnn-looks-doomed-280568

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.

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.

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.

It's rather short, so:

> CNN’s just-launched direct-to-consumer streaming service CNN+ is shutting down, a person with knowledge of the matter said. An announcement is expected as early as Thursday, the person said. Incoming CNN Chairman and Chief Executive Chris Licht, who hasn’t even officially assumed his role yet, told staffers of the decision on Thursday morning, the person said. Andrew Morse, the executive in charge of the service, is leaving the company, the person said.

> The move to shutter the service on April 30, merely a month after it launched, comes only a week after CNN’s parent company WarnerMedia was taken over by Discovery Communications. Discovery’s executives were dubious about the strategy of the service even before its deal to acquire the company closed, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking.

> CNN’s previous regime, with backing from former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, spent $300 million on developing CNN+, people familiar with the operation said. CNN wooed big-name talent, including Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, to join the service.

They forgot to say 'Breaking News'.

Unfortunate. I was going to use this to watch all of Parts Unknown.

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.

I disagree to an extent.

We agree on that fact that people are willing to pay for content that is perceived as valuable to them.

Part of the issue is that CNN is not exactly news. It is mostly opinion pieces ( please don't think I am being biased -- same is true for FOX, MSN and so on ). There is a reason for that, it sells and can gather quite a following as some personalities do show in terms of ratings.

With that in mind, the issue is that 'personalities' on CNN do not offer an 'opinion' that is palatable to a large or valuable segment of population. Amusingly, they seem very much out of step with those. We can argue over why, but I don't think it will help discussion here.

In terms of analogy, Tucker might offer you a Big Mac type opinion; it is a drive-by, easy and rather unhealthy long term, but CNN is not sushi, it is not a gourmet steak.. it is a guy telling me I should try cauliflower dropped quinoa - you could argue it is good for you, but not exactly broad appeal.

My point is.. CNN, if you want to do opinion pieces, you DO need to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you want to be above it all, then do news and abstain from putting a finger on the scale of public opinion.

All sorts of people pay for news media and punditry like The Blaze or The Daily Wire. Glenn Beck and Ben Shapiro are doing very well for themselves.

I don't know, what about substack? People are seeking out journalism and paying for it.

CNN non plus. didnt even know it was a thing

WSJ is owned by Fox News. I could give give less of a damn about what they have to say.

They lasted longer than I expected.

Can't say I'm surprised

Can you say "Quibi"?

So much in common.

They chose terrible timing to launch it.

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.

In CNNs defense, they propably planned this with the expectation that Trump would win the second term.

>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.

Jesus fucking Christ. What would the opposition have to do for you to believe they are the bad guys? Like a coup or something?

Yes, a couple people storming the capital means that the other 150 million people in the US are also "bad guys".

This attitude didn't help Hillary either when she put half of the country in her "basket of deplorables".

It did help—it got Trump elected. Tyvm.

I miss Ted Turner

Fail fast(?)

Feels like existential crisis for CNN. Ironically their shrinking rating could be rescued if Trump is seriously making a run for 2nd term.

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.

You're right and I worry they will try to bring Trump back.

Well at least this shows people won’t pay for misinformation

Paywall.

One CNN is bad enough, CNN+ is just traaash on steroids!

bye bye :) CNN's reputation is severely damaged and they'll never recover

Doubtful. At least doubtful that the reputational damage will be their demise. Fox News has done worse for longer and are still the number one in cable news.

number 1 in a pack of losers makes you the biggest loser

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