CNN+ lasted three weeks before Warner Bros. Discovery decided to kill it. Despite $300 million worth of investments in its development, CNN’s subscription-based streaming service was a complete disaster, reportedly only getting about 10,000 active users a day.
But Brian Stelter still thinks it may have been a success.
“It’s too early to know if this product, if this service, was a success or a failure,” Stelter said during Friday’s episode of “Reliable Sources Daily” on CNN+. “You’ve got all the haters today saying this thing was a failure. I don’t know if we can even ever assess that because it just simply didn’t have enough time because of the management’s change in direction.”
"It's too early to know if this product, if this service was a success or a failure," Stelter desperately tried to rationalize the implosion of CNN+. And he chided the "haters." pic.twitter.com/vCFR3Q7dT4
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) April 22, 2022
Success? Failure? Po-tay-to? Po-tah-to? Who can say really?
Pretty much everyone else, that’s who.
“I defy you to find any reasonable person who ever believed that viewers would pay extra money for the dregs of CNN when it was competing for their wallets with Netflix and Disney Plus,” a former CNN producer told Fox News Digital. “Do you want to watch ‘The Mandalorian’ or extra Brian Stelter?”
“There should be consequences for the CNN executives who rammed the launch through despite Discovery clearly telegraphing their skepticism,” the former CNN producer added. “Everything should have been paused the day Jeff Zucker was fired because no one else at that level ever thought CNN+ could work.”
Well, I guess that means two people were believers.
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