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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

Why what happened with CNN+? And what is CNN+?

CNN+ is the ill-fated streaming subscription news service of CNN. According to CNN, CNN+ failed because of the merger between WarnerMedia, CNN's parent company, and Discovery, and not because of low viewership. The purported reason for the shut down was that CNN+ does not align with Discovery's streaming strategy, because Discovery wants to have bundled streaming services with multiple offerings for its brands, versus a dedicated niche streaming service for each brand. [1]

Is this the real explanation or was it low viewership / subscriptions? I have no idea. It seems odd that they would shut down the service instead of simply folding it in to whatever successor services took its place, which wouldn't have such a terrible narrative around it.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/21/media/cnn-streaming-reliable-...

"Is this the real explanation or was it low viewership / subscriptions?"

Oh it's 100% low viewership & subscriptions. If it was making money you don't just slam the money spigot shut without a plan. You tell people you're going to do your merge or whatever and you do a cutover without interruption.

When businesses say "We did X because of Y", my suggestion is simply straight-up ignore the claimed reason. Or, slightly more sophisticated, that statement should be read as "We did X and we'd like you to act as if the reason is Y". It should be read as only weak support for Y being a reason at all, let alone the primary reason. Politician's statements should be read the same way, for that matter.

If you pay attention to these sorts of statements it isn't hard to start noticing a number of statements where X and Y actively contradict each other. A common one is where Y is "for your convenience", e.g., "We've fired all our human support staff and replaced them with a deep, impenetrable phone tree that doesn't even cover the top 3 reasons people called our support staff, for your convenience".

It's only been out for 1 month though; that isn't enough time to generate intrigue. Look at how long Apple TV+ has taken to get up and running with good original content.

The big thing is that normally a merger would have delayed or cancelled a project like this, scheduled to begin so close to the merger. This was probably someone's pet project where the only hope for it was to demonstrate it was profitable before the merger closed, which would have resulted in its preservation.

>"Is this the real explanation or was it low viewership / subscriptions?"

Potentially, but it does seem like a convenient excuse. As a thought experiment, if it beat expectations and had high viewership/subscriptions I doubt it would have been shuttered using the alignment justification. They would have just kept it and allowed it to be an outlier.

"CNN+ streaming service is shutting down a month after launching" https://www.wsj.com/articles/warner-bros-discovery-is-shutti... (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111276 | 285 points | 21 hours ago | 310 comments)

It’s a streaming news service. It is shutting down.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/21/media/cnn-shutting-down/index...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/warner-bros-discovery-is-shutti...

I'll be the first to call it Quibi for news. And it won't be the last streaming company to fail. It could be said that, in many ways, all of them are failing except Disney+.

Quibi lasted for >6 months. This is even more embarrassing than that. So you're actually insulting Quibi with this comparison.

On the other hand, at least Quibi no longer has to worry about having a line in a TV show like "Was it Quibi bad?", now everyone will use "Was it CNN+ bad?".

> And what is CNN+?<

CNN+ : <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN+>

You see. This is why it failed.

Sounds like something that could be fixed.

Even if CNN+ had an incredibly effective advertising campaign, I just don't think the product they are trying to sell is that compelling for most people.

This. CNN has loss the gravitas it believes it has to foolishly have the hubris to believe there’s enough people to see their “anchors” do side/passion/fluff work. If it was bundled with the full channel they may have been able to, but unlike ESPN+, they don’t have content for an audience that would succumb to their efforts.

Edit: ex-CEO Jeff Zucker and old execs made the decision. If you look at the photos online of the teams, it was clear that this outcome was inevitable.

If you're thinking that Fox is the home of American Wholesomeness and Truth, you should note that CNN hired Chris Wallace from them, after all, just for CNN+.

It was a way to spend money to stream propaganda directly into your family home in order to become a misinformed neurotic mess. It shut down after a few weeks because netflix for disinformation wasn't as popular as some executives expected.

After a month you don't know much about the market. Seems like someone wanted it dead from the beginning.

CNN+ really didn’t have any marquee talent. MSMBC has Maddow and people would pay to watch her, Fox has Tucker, people would (and do) pay to watch him on Fox Nation. But people aren’t going to get out their wallets for Don Lemon. That isn’t snark, his TV ratings support that assertion. If CNN wasn’t force fed to people at airports, I’m not sure if they would have any viewers at all, at least not in any profitable numbers. Jeff Zucker ruined CNN. It used to be a trusted centrist organization but instead they are stuck in a limbo zone of not being as good at being left wing as MSNBC despite trying and being left wing enough that they don’t really catch the center very well. MSNBC wins the left, Fox gets the right. CNN is just like an MSNBC also-ran. CNN has some really good hard news and foreign policy journalists, but they are overshadowed by a lackluster commentators that alienate people that don’t really want another Fox or MSNBC. The Cuomo nonsense from both the host and the governor turned a lot of people off as well. Their double down as the Anti-Trump network busted them when they didn’t have Trump around to drive ratings. Now they are just a shell.

The ratings of regular CNN are pretty terrible as it is. The idea that people would pay for more CNN is just not supported by the data. They spent $300 million and accomplished very little. A foolish leader would keep that project alive. How many more hundreds of millions would it take to get it to a critical mass of users to make it not only profitable, but profitable enough to earn back that massive investment?

Anyone that has been to business school would see that CNN+ was a Zucker vanity project that was badly executed. It will likely be an MBA case study right up there with New Coke.

CNN lacks 'marquee talent' because they wanted their programming to be less about the personalities reading the news and more about drilling down into the stories themselves and finding experts who can offer insight.

Fox News, on the other hand, has found that they can drive viewership not only with a bevy of leggy blondes but with strong, domineering hosts in weeknight commentary slots. Witness Bill O'Reilly and his 'shut up' and faux 'no spin' catchphrases. Fox held onto Bill until the sexual harassment suits forced them to shut him down. As bad as Bill was, he wasn't as toady as Hannity is today, towing the party line to a point that he is unwatchable for all but the most indoctrinated. The Five is another Fox show that offers Fox personalities a means to build up their own personal brands, much like how Greg Gutfeld has done now in his own show. In fostering a stable of personalities, Fox places few limits on how far they can go. On Monday of this week, the mononymous Kennedy gratuitously muttered about how Bruce Springsteen was a 'massive pinko', merely as 'Glory Days' was playing on her show's return from commercial break [0]. Only a show that feels like it has its viewers eating of the palm of it's hand would act so brazenly.

While CNN is flawed with weak hosts and is overly repetitive, it was surely a source of fresh air during the Trump impeachments when the bias of both Fox News & Business made their shows mostly a fictional defense of Trump.

Your 'business school case study' discussion needs to consider the fact that right now is a very poor time to start up a streaming service, regardless of the quality of the CNN+ service itself. Look at what just happened at Netflix earlier this week with the drop in subscribers. The market is simply reaching saturation. Also, give CNN credit for cleaning house of Cuomo, Zucker and even his girlfriend -- but this meant that CNN+ lost its brainchild Zucker. Let's not forget there was a time when Zucker was a wunderkind [1]. At the same time, the fee structure was poorly thought out and the material just wasn't there.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCJn4giT9c

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/endurance-of-jeff-zu...

Also, you don’t learn about the market after the fact. Spending $300 million requires one to know the market long before. And the executives as CNN clearly didn’t do their homework. Predicting failure can be hard, but creating a paid streaming service for a network already getting hammered in the ratings was pretty foolish. It was like an abused spouse thinking that getting pregnant would suddenly stop the abuse. They should fix CNN itself, build an audience, then try to further monetize with CNN+. They did it backwards.

A 2nd-place news channel only watched by people old enough to still pay for cable, launched a streaming service with only bad or re-run content. Predictably, this didn't go well.

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