CNN+ halts marketing, yet production continues on content

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Bob Jersey

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Apr 19, 2022, 4:28:12 PM4/19/22
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At least till new bosses JB Perrette and Chris Licht get a chance to look over things.


Licht begins at the company May 2nd, at which time he'll quit Twitter.


B

Joe Hass

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Apr 21, 2022, 12:27:18 PM4/21/22
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Kevin M.

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Apr 21, 2022, 12:33:15 PM4/21/22
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All anybody wanted was access to a live stream for breaking news. CNN execs couldn’t figure that out.  

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

Tom Wolper

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Apr 21, 2022, 1:40:34 PM4/21/22
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I wish I had $300 million I could throw away like that. I was surprised to see that Chris Wallace’s show wasn’t about interviewing newsmakers but interviewing people like William Shatner and Joan Collins. Were they targeting nursing homes?


Kevin M.

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Apr 22, 2022, 12:20:06 AM4/22/22
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Remember this picture trending of a bunch of white guys in charge of CNN+? People, myself included, pointed out that in Atlanta, to not have ANY other ethnic representation showed a profound disconnect from the potential online audience. I can’t prove that’s why it failed, but…


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Tom Wolper

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Apr 22, 2022, 4:18:47 PM4/22/22
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Journalists I follow on twitter say the consequences of a failure this large are going to reverberate in CNN for years.

Paul Murray

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Apr 22, 2022, 5:44:19 PM4/22/22
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I'm puzzled that no one at CNN seemed to consider, "since we're being acquired, maybe we should hold off launching this expensive venture until we see what our new overlords think." Especially since their plans called for losing $1b in the first few years, and the new company was already going to be saddled with plenty of debt, courtesy of AT&T.

I can only conclude that either a) they were high on their own supply and convinced that CNN+ was a work of absolute genius that everyone would recognize or b) they knew the new guys would pull the plug, and they were determined to plunge ahead regardless.

From what I have read, Discovery was wary for legal reasons of issuing any directions to Warner pre-merger.

PGage

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Apr 22, 2022, 6:33:04 PM4/22/22
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Based on the reporting of Dylan Byers at Puck, the answer is both A and B (not sure they are that different). Zaslav, while respecting that he had no say until he officially too over, has made it clear he is looking for efficiency (he has promised $3B Of savings in cost synergies), and that clearly always included combining all of the new assets in one streaming service. There will be CNN content online, maybe a lot of it, but it will be on whatever they eventually call the new thing, which likely will eventually also fold in HBO. 

The CNN people saw CNN+ primarily in terms of serving their news mission and ambition (to be the news organization of choice on the internet, supplanting the NYT). I think they were betting that if they committed CNN financially and publicly enough before the new guys came in, they would have no choice but to keep going. They lost that bet.

The newsroom is seeing this as a demoralizing and disrespectful de-prioritizing of News within the new company. They may be correct, but I think it is too soon to tell. CNN+ Always seemed a little self important and deluded an idea, and I have never heard an explanation of how news, whose main attribute is timeliness, translates well to the archived, mended and on demand environment of streaming.  

Whatever Chris Wallace wants to do, it arguably will be more successful if somehow pushed to the consumer of John Oliver or Bill Maher, than as the furtive lynchpin of an all news streamer.

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Kevin M.

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Apr 22, 2022, 6:40:17 PM4/22/22
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I didn’t subscribe to it, because the very concept of paying for what CNN does seems wrong on multiple levels, but I don’t think dropping CNN+ after a month disrespects the newsroom; I think the content coming out of the newsroom disrespects the newsroom. 

It wouldn’t take much to make CNN a go-to source for news, but the network’s insane plan of elevating personalities and pundits over journalists and experts, reducing the network to armchair quarterbacks who bark over each other then pat each other on the back for doing it, prevents that from ever happening. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

Jon Delfin

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Apr 22, 2022, 6:45:55 PM4/22/22
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I read someone's musing that the Chris Cuomo 9:00 slot might become a hard news hour. Seems like a comfy landing spot for Wallace.

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PGage

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Apr 22, 2022, 6:48:22 PM4/22/22
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Totally agree that CNN as is hardly inspires cutting edge journalism.

What I am curious about Kevin (or anyone else) is how does streaming news+opinion offer an advantage over the linear cable platform. Ideally a basic newscast would repeat and be updated multiple times in the 24 hour day on cable or streaming, so why do I need to be able to view a newscast online from even 4 hours ago? There may be special reports and documentaries from CNN cable that would be nice to archive and access as desired online, but that seems like a supplement, not a replacement of the cable presence.

If I were a news first guy at CNN, I would be caring less about a vanity streaming presence, and more about upgrading the journalism on the mothership. Get that right, and then just simulcast it on streaming to magnify it’s footprint.

Kevin M.

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Apr 22, 2022, 6:59:53 PM4/22/22
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I don’t understand why anyone at CNN thought their viewers would buy different CNN content that was streamed.

In college I used to have “CNN Headline News” on in the background constantly. As background noise, at the time nothing was better. When I lived in Central Asia, when I had access to cable, I turned on BBC World News. It was even better background noise. Yes, they were both repetitive but it was live journalism in living color when and where I wanted it. 

Whether the “flagship” network is overhauled or the streaming content is relaunched, if the focus isn’t on journalism, it is fundamentally flawed. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

Tom Wolper

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Apr 24, 2022, 2:13:09 PM4/24/22
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For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to think of what I would want from a CNN subscription service and I can’t come up with anything. I’d like on demand documentary explainers that go deep into topics but they are available for free on YouTube.

Adam Bowie

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Apr 24, 2022, 3:21:07 PM4/24/22
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The primary problem that CNN is facing is that what everyone would really want from a streaming CNN (if they want it at all) would be - well - regular CNN. 

But right now, they just can't deliver that - not without you first buying a cable bundle. The $1.01 (according to Variety back in 2020 - https://variety.com/vip/pay-tv-true-cost-free-1234810682/) that CNN gets per user per month is worth something of the order of $800m a year or thereabouts, and they can't afford to give that up. CNN's most recent *profits* are ~$700m! But obviously a significant number of people have cut the cord and don't have cable, and there's no current way that CNN can sell those households their regular service because of the exclusivity deals they've done with cable (and satellite) operators. Cable would simply stop paying the $1 a month if they weren't exclusive.

The number of cable homes falls year on year, so those cable revenues fall commensurately. At some point, CNN will have to bite the bullet and give up those exclusivity deals. But in the meantime, CNN+ was at least theoretically, a workaround or hedge to allow people to get a sort-of-CNN without cable. Yes - at launch CNN+ was supposed to be for super-fans of the regular service (just as Fox News fans have Fox Nation - they too can't put their main offering on a streaming service), but in time they would surely have wanted to grow it out and offer a version of the service that didn't cost them that lucrative cable money.

How CNN, Fox News, ESPN and others navigate this will be interesting. The networks and studios with non-news and sport can do it by slowly shifting shows to their streamers, and putting all the "good" stuff on streaming. Hence we see ABC shifting Dancing with the Stars to Disney+. CBS can stay full of NCIS spin-offs, while anything else goes on Paramount+ and so on.

There's a good question about how news should work in a streaming world, but honestly I think a "lift and shift" from linear broadcast to streaming would be just fine for a lot of people. Add in the ability for me to watch a 20-30 minute regularly updated news bulletin on demand, and that's just fine. I bet a load of streaming only folk would happily leave something like CNN streaming live in the background on mute or low volume, just keeping an eye for "Breaking News" banners. But it's a business limitation they face right now.


Adam



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PGage

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Apr 24, 2022, 5:39:33 PM4/24/22
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Okay, thanks for this Adam. I guess I knew about the exclusivity part of the cable deal, but was not thinking about it. That does explain why CNN+ is not mostly CNN news summaries on a loop. I access television through YoutubeTV, mostly through my Fire at TV stick, so it feels just like streaming anyway, so I forget that is accessing cable, not true streaming.


Adam Bowie

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Apr 25, 2022, 5:53:19 AM4/25/22
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Yeah - YouTube TV is a 2022 delivery model operating under a 2002 business model. You still pay for a bundle of channels, a fair few I suspect you don't watch.

There's a really good piece on CNBC which seems like the most balanced reporting I've read on the whole CNN+ fiasco: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/24/cnn-plus-what-went-wrong-why-it-was-canceled.html

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PGage

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Apr 25, 2022, 10:33:40 AM4/25/22
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That may be, though since previously I was paying almost twice as much for Xfinity for a 2012 delivery system for a 2002 business model, I am still enjoying YouTube TV. We can not get over the air reception where I live, and I do want access to things on broadcast and cable I can’t get otherwise, or as easily (including ESPN, cable news, and sports).

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