It's not only that, Jeff Zucker, who ran CNN was forced out in February, so the big executive sponsor of this project disappeared. That's quite likely to have had a big impact too.
I got the impression that Zucker was advocating for the streaming service in part to pad his own resume and gain a tactical position at the merged company.
Re:The chaotic collapse of CNN+
by TechBro8615 on Friday April 22, 2022 @11:58AM
(#31123295)
Sure, but the main contributing factor remains that nobody used it. And the widespread schadenfreude I suspect is mostly due to how blatantly obvious it should have been that nobody would pay for CNN+.
I've just read that live CNN wasn't even available on CNN+. That's idiotic. I can't get CNN without a full fledged cable subscription, but if this was cheap and offered a CNN livestream I'd think about it, but not even offering the live feed is just absurd.
The only reason CNN still exists is because it's bundled with cable and everyone gets (and pays for) CNN on a basic cable tier. The brutal truth? Almost nobody watches CNN unless something very significant happens. On the flip side, almost everybody with cable pays for CNN.
To be fair, if I need to test dns I always nslookup cnn.com … just muscle memory for 35 years …
… and I am in a much more desirable demo …
Re:The chaotic collapse of CNN+
by onionisafruit on Friday April 22, 2022 @08:32PM
(#31130045)
I do the same. I used to load cnn.com because it was easy to tell if I was getting a cached page. The current time was displayed and rendered by the server.
I thought cnn was already free to stream on networks such as plutotv. (https://pluto.tv/en/live-tv/cnn). I don’t know if it is a full stream or highlights though, since I never actually watched it. I use Pluto mostly for Bloomberg.
Of course nobody used it; it was marketed poorly, and funding for marketing was cut early on, as indicated in the article.
I have no idea if the service would have succeeded under different circumstances, but as OP stated, this was the rushed pet project of outgoing executives during a merger. Any outcome other than DOA was highly unlikely.
Re:The chaotic collapse of CNN+
by Overtonwindow on Friday April 22, 2022 @11:47AM
(#31123110)
Or, it really was that bad and flopped so hard out of the gate that it was better to cut the losses.
I was speaking to why they rushed the launch. CNN+ being intrinsically bad as a service and/or a terrible fit for their built-in market can also be true, and the two reinforce each other:
This is 100% unadulterated speculation on my part, but if the executives still in charge of CNN+ thought it had problems, they'd be doubly fearful of the axe coming down when the business was reviewed, so they may have been motivated to get it launched whether they were ready to launch or not.
If they had no fear of a business review and possible cancellation, they might have decided to delay the launch and try to fix the content/market problems.
It's quite common for ventures like this to be put on hold while a review is conducted, and even if the venture is sound, such things often wind up dying because of infighting over the review or loss of momentum. The article suggests that the team, anticipating this outcome, rushed the launch to make it more difficult to cancel the service.
As it happened, the launch fizzled. But if I'm reading it right, the service was doomed from the moment the merger was finalized. Perhaps if the launch was a surprise success, it might have survived the merger.
So perhaps the rushed launch was a "Hail Mary," and while it seems embarrassing, it's no more embarrassing than launching a Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of an American football game and seeing it picked off and run back for a touchdown.
Such things are of no real consequence, because the game was already lost.