Written by Virginia Kruta, columnist at the Daily Wire
CNN+, the fledgling subscription service from cable news giant CNN, will stop streaming on April 30 — just over one month after its March 29th launch date.
But because the streaming service was shut down as a result of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, everyone at CNN is being spared the lesson they should be learning: the streaming service would have failed anyway because it was awful.
According to reports from multiple sources — including CNN media reporters Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy — the network executives at Discovery had a different vision for an all-encompassing streaming service and were not happy that CNN had launched prior to the merger’s completion.
The consensus following the demise of CNN+ is that the Discovery execs who shut it down were sparing staffers the heartache of watching their project wither and die — and that’s exactly right.
The problem is that now staffers only have one month of data from which to draw conclusions as to whether or not the service was a “success.” And while a few of former “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace’s high-profile interviews drew some attention, the total number of subscribers was still under 200,000 and the service was averaging fewer than 10,000 viewers on a daily basis.
Veteran shock jock and Sirius XM radio host Howard Stern laid out the issue very plainly in the weeks before the launch when he asked listeners who in the hell was going to pay for more content from a network that no one wanted to watch for free?
They should have let the market decide because then there would be no doubt that the content, not the branding, was the problem.