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Comment by Aqueous | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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"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.

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