It’s not often that streaming services debut and then shut down in the same year — Quibi is a notable exception. CNN’s new premium streaming service has beaten even that speedrun. CNN+ launched not even a month ago, and the company has now announced that it will shut down on April 30th.
The decision came down from CNN’s new CEO, Chris Licht. CNN’s former parent company merged with Discovery to become Warner Bros. Discovery earlier this month, and CNN+ was seen by the new management team as unlikely to succeed. He told employees that it was a “uniquely shitty situation.” CNN+ staff will get pay and benefits for the next 90 days, and those who are not offered jobs in other parts of the company will have at least six months of severance pay.
J.B. Perrette, Discovery’s streaming media director, noted that consumers are increasingly looking for simplicity and all-in-one services, which is probably fair. When Netflix and Hulu were the only major streaming services, you could get all your content from them. Now, numerous media outfits have launched their own streaming services with siloed exclusive content, resulting in a media landscape that increasingly looks like cable TV channels.
The pitch for CNN+ felt like yet another silo, and it didn’t even have access to most of CNN’s content. For example, there was no way to stream the network’s main news channel in CNN+. Instead, CNN+ was going to experiment with new ways to cover the news, focusing on personalities and interactive content.
CNN+, the streaming service that was hyped as one of the most signifiant developments in the history of CNN, will shut down on April 30, just one month after it launched. https://t.co/K92mv8qBE7
— CNN (@CNN) April 21, 2022
CNN was initially expecting to spend up to $1 billion on CNN+, and it has already dropped at least $100 million on it. Reports have suggested that CNN+ was looking like a flop out of the gate, with about 150,000 subscribers signing up for the $5.99 monthly service. Only about 10,000 were using CNN+ on a daily basis, and we’ll never know if that number was set to rise or fall now that the service is shutting down. CNN says that all those subscribers will get a prorated refund.
The new leadership of Warner Bros. Discovery was reportedly frustrated that CNN+ had launched in the first place. The combined company already has HBO Max and Discovery+, and the intention is to merge those services. Keeping CNN+ as a separate entity was just not in the cards. This isn’t the first time CNN had to give up on a streaming platform. It dropped Beme in 2018, less than two years after it acquired the app from Casey Neistat for $25 million.
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