On April 8, 2022 Discovery acquired WarnerMedia. The new company name is now Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Including in the assets that Discovery CEO David Zaslav now has access to is HBO, HBO Max, TNT, TBS, Warner Bros movie and TV library, and CNN.
CNN was founded in 1980 as the first 24 hour cable news channel in America. Since then it’s grown to include multiple channels, text news on their website, radio, and a large international presence. They also recently got into streaming as well. In fact it just launched it’s streaming service CNN+ on March 29,2022, a mere ten days before the acquisition was completed. It was announced that they had just reached 150,000 and for a news streaming service that just launched weeks prior at $5.99, that’s pretty good.
CNN+
Based on the success the streaming service seemed to have, you can imagine the surprise when Warner Bros. Discovery announced that on April 30, 2022, CNN+ will be shut down. It was previously reported that HBO Max and Discovery+ along with other programming from Warner Media would be merged into a single streaming service at some point in the future. With CNN+ shutting down, it is looking more likely that a news portion will be a part of this new streaming service whenever it launches.
CNN+ currently has over 600 employees that will lose their jobs once the service shut down. They’ve also invested hundreds of millions of dollars on talent and programming for CNN+, but it sounds like some of that programming will move to HBO Max, CNN.com, and the free CNN app. If they are shifting the programming over to HBO Max, then the new streaming service combination could be coming sooner than expected, which would make sense if they were immediately shutting down CNN+. If it was still at least a year away then it might make sense for CNN+ to continue to run as it was to recoup some of the money that was spent, but shutting it down sounds like we could see the new service in a few months.
Bundles
Merging HBO Max and Discovery+ (and assuming CNN+) is a completely different direction than Disney did when they launched Disney+. Instead of merging Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN, they launched a bundle where you get all 3 services. They could have went with a bundle since they don’t own Hulu outright and wasn’t willing to buy out Comcast’s 33% of the service, however since Disney has operational control of the service, they might be able to shut it down completely without Comcast’s permission.
Hulu’s big draw is the next day content, after it airs live, it is available on the platform the next day. Comcast is going to be pulling some content from the service starting in Fall 2022, which makes sense as they also have their own streaming service, Peacock. If Peacock gets NBC content like Saturday Night Live the next day, that could be a huge draw for them.
What do you think, do you like the bundle option that Disney has or would you prefer everything to be in one service like Warner Bros Discovery seems to be doing?
