Ask HN: CNN+ Software Engineers

It was a way to spend money to stream propaganda directly into your family home in order to become a misinformed neurotic mess. It shut down after a few weeks because netflix for disinformation wasn't as popular as some executives expected.

datavirtue• 4 years ago

After a month you don't know much about the market. Seems like someone wanted it dead from the beginning.

dtagames• 4 years ago

I'll be the first to call it Quibi for news. And it won't be the last streaming company to fail. It could be said that, in many ways, all of them are failing except Disney+.

dylan604• 4 years ago

Quibi lasted for >6 months. This is even more embarrassing than that. So you're actually insulting Quibi with this comparison.

On the other hand, at least Quibi no longer has to worry about having a line in a TV show like "Was it Quibi bad?", now everyone will use "Was it CNN+ bad?".

rvz• 4 years ago

You see. This is why it failed.

yreg• 4 years ago

Sounds like something that could be fixed.

Aqueous• 4 years ago

CNN+ is the ill-fated streaming subscription news service of CNN. According to CNN, CNN+ failed because of the merger between WarnerMedia, CNN's parent company, and Discovery, and not because of low viewership. The purported reason for the shut down was that CNN+ does not align with Discovery's streaming strategy, because Discovery wants to have bundled streaming services with multiple offerings for its brands, versus a dedicated niche streaming service for each brand. [1]

Is this the real explanation or was it low viewership / subscriptions? I have no idea. It seems odd that they would shut down the service instead of simply folding it in to whatever successor services took its place, which wouldn't have such a terrible narrative around it.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/21/media/cnn-streaming-reliable-...

jerf• 4 years ago

"Is this the real explanation or was it low viewership / subscriptions?"

Oh it's 100% low viewership & subscriptions. If it was making money you don't just slam the money spigot shut without a plan. You tell people you're going to do your merge or whatever and you do a cutover without interruption.

When businesses say "We did X because of Y", my suggestion is simply straight-up ignore the claimed reason. Or, slightly more sophisticated, that statement should be read as "We did X and we'd like you to act as if the reason is Y". It should be read as only weak support for Y being a reason at all, let alone the primary reason. Politician's statements should be read the same way, for that matter.

If you pay attention to these sorts of statements it isn't hard to start noticing a number of statements where X and Y actively contradict each other. A common one is where Y is "for your convenience", e.g., "We've fired all our human support staff and replaced them with a deep, impenetrable phone tree that doesn't even cover the top 3 reasons people called our support staff, for your convenience".

BitwiseFool3• 4 years ago

"Is this the real explanation or was it low viewership / subscriptions?"

Potentially, but it does seem like a convenient excuse. As a thought experiment, if it beat expectations and had high viewership/subscriptions I doubt it would have been shuttered using the alignment justification. They would have just kept it and allowed it to be an outlier.

brimble• 4 years ago

A 2nd-place news channel only watched by people old enough to still pay for cable, launched a streaming service with only bad or re-run content. Predictably, this didn't go well.

marban• 4 years ago

Since the + tab was integrated in the regular CNN app (w/ region-check), incl. login, etc. it doesn't seem as if the wheel was dramatically reinvented here.

joshbaptiste• 4 years ago

I don't understand why CNN+ was dropped so quickly I haven't heard of it until the pullback

jaywalk• 4 years ago

Because it was a spectacular failure, and with CNN's parent company changing ownership earlier this month, the new people in charge had no desire to dump more money into something that isn't going to pan out.

rapsey• 4 years ago

Yeah the guy spearheading it left and everyone else could not wait to get rid of it.

the_snooze• 4 years ago

I haven't heard of it until the pullback

That's basically the reason. CNN dumped a bunch of resources into it without really identifying what audience or demand CNN+ is trying to satisfy.

swozey• 4 years ago

IMO there's a huge untapped market: Millennials and younger who have never in their lives paid for cable TV.

Fox news IIRC airs their shows live on Youtube, but MSNBC (eg, maddow) doesn't, so I wind up having to find some pirated stream on a janky ad-spammed site to watch the news live. Or, w/Maddow wait for her podcast to drop around midnight.

Being television I'm sure it's some contractual thing with the tv networks as to why there aren't more free/cheap/easy news streaming options. It'd be nice if there were, I think that'd get younger people much more engaged in politics. Also the fact that it's so easy to get OAN/Fox and difficult to get the other side...

meragrin_• 4 years ago

Victim of the merge is my guess. There is Discovery+ and HBO Max. Having 3 probably seemed dumb to them and are probably already in motion to have a single streaming service. It was probably easier to out right kill it than to spend the resources to merge the users into something else.

samizdis• 4 years ago

Axios article today, with a fair bit of depth, discusses the events/timeline etc:

https://www.axios.com/cnn-plus-discovery-zucker-zaslav-fc031...

dhzhzjsbevs• 4 years ago

300m marketing budget for less than 10k users.

Math?

gjsman-1000• 4 years ago

Technically speaking, less than 10,000 daily active users, even though total user count was between 100,000 and 150,000. However, all those first month subscribers got a discounted plan of $2.99/mo. instead of $5.99/mo., for life.

The math is terrible. They probably didn't even make enough money to buy even half of a house in San Fran, despite $300 million spent in questionable ways (Chris Wallace gets a $9 million contract?? He's laughing his head off all the way to the bank.)

matwood• 4 years ago

I think it shows the importance of leadership and vision in a new endeavor. When the CEO who was pro CNN+ had to quit because of a relationship, CNN+ lost its vision right at a crucial time.

Hard to know if it would have ultimately made any difference, but it certainly was a negative.

mrmanner• 4 years ago

What tech stack did you use?

CNN++ ofc

0des• 4 years ago

Fuck it, it's Friday. You got me good here

2pointsomone• 4 years ago

I keep getting penalized for being funny on HN (one aspect I don't like about it), so I am going to upvote this pun hard

wpasc• 4 years ago

I think the bar for upvote receiving humor is just high on HN

ransom1538• 4 years ago

My favorite pun i made is when SnapChat glasses came out. I stated: "OH - great! birth control for your face! I hated condoms anyway." It started blowing up. Tons of points. It was going to be stuck as the first comment the entire day. Someone (dang) made it go to the very bottom - which is fine - this isn't reddit.

Foobar8568• 4 years ago

If it wasn't the proof they were way too in advanced in Machine Learning....

jupp0r2• 4 years ago

Sorry I don't understand the joke, but it must be quite funny according to my peer comments. Can you explain it to me?

naoqj• 4 years ago

C++ is a programming language.

Tr3nton2• 4 years ago

This is great news. Hopefully the regular CNN will fold soon as well. Their target audience is Boomers, and their business model is to enrage their viewers with sensationalism or outright propaganda ("Fiery but mostly peaceful protests"), then sell them SSRIs. They are a sick organization.

lushdogg• 4 years ago

So Fox News' business model :)

Covzire• 4 years ago

"professional" Journalism by 2022 has deteriorated to some variation of rat poison. Rat poison pellets are 99.9% good food, but some organizations have gotten the recipe completely backwards and are more like 99.9% poison, CNN being one of those organizations if you ask me.

blantonl• 4 years ago

Replace SSRIs with Gold and Reverse Mortgages and then you've got the comparison correct. :)

nerdawson2• 4 years ago

their business model is to enrage their viewers with sensationalism or outright propaganda

You've just described all news media.

dominotw• 4 years ago

not nytimes. One of the very few places not relying on outrage revenue.

pc862• 4 years ago

What you've said, while completely accurate, is not unique to CNN and they weren't the first organization (or even media organization, or even television media organization) to do it. So focusing your anger on them seems odd and misplaced.

shockeychap• 4 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree about it not being unique to CNN. However, I don't think there's anything odd or misplaced about focusing on CNN, since the entire context is very specifically that of CNN+. I've seen many a similar comment here on HN about the toxicity of Fox News (which is just as bad) that made no mention of other new services like CNN and MSNBC. Your political leaning might influence which batch of toxicity you describe more, but they're all a part of the same putrid stew.

lolinder• 4 years ago

In addition to what others have said, it's bizarre to me that the first thing you list that you dislike is "their target audience is boomers". I know there's an anti-baby-boomer meme that's popular on other parts of the internet, but it doesn't belong here.

Clubber• 4 years ago

t's bizarre to me that the first thing you list that you dislike is "their target audience is boomers"

It's like fighting rage culture of the news with more rage.

Tr3nton2• 4 years ago

I never stated I disliked Boomers, I stated that Boomers are CNN's target audience. Though given the tone of the rest of my comment I can see how some malice could be construed.

gaws• 4 years ago

Their target audience is Boomers, and their business model is to enrage their viewers with sensationalism or outright propaganda

You just described Fox News.

infamouscow2• 4 years ago

To any CNN+ software engineers: you made a great product and should be proud of your work. The failure is not your fault. The failure is 100% because CNN is run by some of the dumbest people in the world.

markoman5• 4 years ago

Have you seen Netflix's stock this week? It's also just a really poor time to start up a streaming service.

infamouscow2• 4 years ago

HBO Max and Disney+ gained subscribers. It's only a bad time if you can't compete.

lappet• 4 years ago

About time AWS offered a managed streaming service

crate_barre• 4 years ago

What is everyone’s age in this thread? It sounds like you are all kids.

A site like CNN+ is using a third party vendor for their video streaming and everything else. The people you are reaching out to are the Rajeshs and Srinis of the world. There is no serious innovation going on.

The tech stack is India, Java, shitheads in Atlanta, and a white hipster douche that does JavaScript and Rust in Williamsburg, practices leetcode on the side due to napoleonic complex and Adderral, hopes to get to a faang one day.

This isn’t groundbreaking stuff.

Ask HN: CNN+ Software Engineers

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