CNN+

» see cnnplus.cnn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

cnn+ never reached turkey at the licensing layer. it never really reached the us either. for the four weeks it was online in march and april 2022 it served fewer than 10,000 daily actives by week two, against an underlying $300 million launch budget and a stated four-year burn plan that ran to a billion. the kindest possible reading is that the audience never got the chance to find it. the honest reading is that there was no audience.

the service launched on march 29 2022 with a roster of high-cost hires. chris wallace left fox news to join. half of cnn's primetime lineup, including anderson cooper and jake tapper, had hours on the platform. the pitch was 8 to 12 hours of original live programming a day, with on-demand specials sitting underneath. the subscription was $2.99 monthly for early signups, locked at that price for as long as you stayed.

the warnermedia-discovery merger closed on april 8, eleven days into the cnn+ launch window. the new cnn ceo chris licht and the new wbd streaming chief jb perrette had not signed off on the cnn+ strategy. on april 21 they announced the shutdown for april 30, ten days of notice for a service that had been live for less than a month.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

cnn had been working on cnn+ for about a year before the merger closed. about 500 people were hired or moved onto the project. the larger fact, which is more uncomfortable, is that cnn already had a streaming product in the form of cnn-on-cable and another one in the form of warnermedia's hbo max news section. cnn+ existed because zucker's cnn wanted its own subscription business to count against future merger negotiations, not because viewers were asking for one.

chris wallace's interviews with willie nelson and kim kardashian were the most-watched content on the platform during its month online. those interviews later moved to hbo max with new branding. wallace is still doing them in 2026.

~ what got buried with it ~

the cnn+ shutdown became the warning case for every other media-company streaming launch in 2022 and 2023. by the end of 2022 disney was discounting hulu bundles aggressively and warner bros discovery itself was folding hbo max and discovery+ together into max. the cnn+ corpse was visible in those decisions.

the cleaner reading is that nobody needed another news streaming subscription. cable news was already a streaming subscription, it just lived inside a different bundle. trying to charge $5.99 monthly for a service that competed with free youtube clips of the same anchors was a math problem that no amount of high-cost talent could solve.

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