CNN+ is dead.
CNN's subscription streaming service went off the Internet two days ago after only a month online. Its end marks the biggest failure in streaming to date and probably one of the biggest flops in all of television - broadcast, cable, streaming - of all time.
What went wrong? It all boils down to bad timing, a bad business model, and a change of strategy after the merger of WarnerMedia, which owned CNN, and Discovery, Inc. to become Warner Brothers-Discovery. CNN+ gained about 150,000 subscribers in its short lifespan, a respectable start for a new streaming service but not enough, considering projected trends of growth, to make it profitable in the foreseeable future. And as the pandemic recedes - "recedes," not "ends" - fewer people see a need to stream things all the time . . . which is why Netflix actually lost subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Also, the new management of the newly formed company is mostly made up of Discovery Inc. veterans who had nothing to do with CNN. CNN+ wasn't their project, and they had no connection or attachment to it. So CNN+'s days were numbered and the number was very small.
I sort of had a feeling that CNN+ was going to fail when I saw samples of its programming. For example, as previously noted on this blog, foreign policy expert Fareed Zakaria interviewed celebrities on CNN+ - not unlike Dan Rather's celebrity interviews on AXS TV, so the novelty of a serious newsman talking to pop stars and the like wasn't exactly fresh. (How far back do you want to go? Edward R. Murrow pioneered the "hard-newsman-interviewing-celebs" concept with "Person To Person.") One of Zakaria's subjects was Billy Joel, whose latest album is, last time I checked, 29 years old as of this writing. (Zakaria showed an excerpt of his interview with Joel on his Sunday cable show, in which Joel talked about how he originally wrote "Movin' Out" to a melody that turned out to have been from Neil Sedaka's "Laughter In the Rain." Yeah, I knew about that. Hardly anything fascinatingly revealing.)
Other CNN+ programs included a show about parenting with Anderson Cooper, a book-review show hosted by Jake Tapper, and a show hosted by Eva Longoria about discovering the wonders of Mexico. (Only anti-Hispanic prejudice could explain why her show wasn't a companion on CNN to Stanley Tucci's very similar series about discovering the wonders of Italy.) The biggest draws of exclusive talent for CNN+ were MSNBC refugee Kasie Hunt and Fox News outcast Chris Wallace hosting their own news programs. I can just imagine CNN brass saying, "Now there's an idea that can't miss!" (Well, George Lucas probably said the same thing about a Star Wars TV special for the 1978 Christmas season.)
Folks like Hunt and Wallace will probably get their own shows on CNN, with Wallace rumored to be under consideration for the 9 PM Eastern slot currently occupied by an expansion of Anderson Cooper's prime-time broadcast. (AC has also been on in the afternoon covering the war in Ukraine, likely because CNN has decided that what we need is more of Anderson Cooper.) Hopefully, they'll move Eva Longoria's series to the cable channel. The enormous sums of money to promote and broadcast CNN+, however, prove that while you may have a solid product, it doesn't guarantee success for a new product that's merely a variation of the existing one.
Ask anyone who ever owned a Pinto-based Ford Mustang II.
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