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Ask HN: CNN+ Software Engineers

53 points by ransom1538 ↗ HN
1) What tech stack did you use?

2) What cloud did you pick?

3) How long were the deadlines?

4) Did CNN know it could lack content?

72 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread
sidcool
Why what happened with CNN+? And what is CNN+?
boredumb
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
After a month you don't know much about the market. Seems like someone wanted it dead from the beginning.
briandear
CNN+ really didn’t have any marquee talent. MSMBC has Maddow and people would pay to watch her, Fox has Tucker, people would (and do) pay to watch him on Fox Nation. But people aren’t going to get out their wallets for Don Lemon. That isn’t snark, his TV ratings support that assertion. If CNN wasn’t force fed to people at airports, I’m not sure if they would have any viewers at all, at least not in any profitable numbers. Jeff Zucker ruined CNN. It used to be a trusted centrist organization but instead they are stuck in a limbo zone of not being as good at being left wing as MSNBC despite trying and being left wing enough that they don’t really catch the center very well. MSNBC wins the left, Fox gets the right. CNN is just like an MSNBC also-ran. CNN has some really good hard news and foreign policy journalists, but they are overshadowed by a lackluster commentators that alienate people that don’t really want another Fox or MSNBC. The Cuomo nonsense from both the host and the governor turned a lot of people off as well. Their double down as the Anti-Trump network busted them when they didn’t have Trump around to drive ratings. Now they are just a shell.

The ratings of regular CNN are pretty terrible as it is. The idea that people would pay for more CNN is just not supported by the data. They spent $300 million and accomplished very little. A foolish leader would keep that project alive. How many more hundreds of millions would it take to get it to a critical mass of users to make it not only profitable, but profitable enough to earn back that massive investment?

Anyone that has been to business school would see that CNN+ was a Zucker vanity project that was badly executed. It will likely be an MBA case study right up there with New Coke.

markoman
CNN lacks 'marquee talent' because they wanted their programming to be less about the personalities reading the news and more about drilling down into the stories themselves and finding experts who can offer insight.

Fox News, on the other hand, has found that they can drive viewership not only with a bevy of leggy blondes but with strong, domineering hosts in weeknight commentary slots. Witness Bill O'Reilly and his 'shut up' and faux 'no spin' catchphrases. Fox held onto Bill until the sexual harassment suits forced them to shut him down. As bad as Bill was, he wasn't as toady as Hannity is today, towing the party line to a point that he is unwatchable for all but the most indoctrinated. The Five is another Fox show that offers Fox personalities a means to build up their own personal brands, much like how Greg Gutfeld has done now in his own show. In fostering a stable of personalities, Fox places few limits on how far they can go. On Monday of this week, the mononymous Kennedy gratuitously muttered about how Bruce Springsteen was a 'massive pinko', merely as 'Glory Days' was playing on her show's return from commercial break [0]. Only a show that feels like it has its viewers eating of the palm of it's hand would act so brazenly.

While CNN is flawed with weak hosts and is overly repetitive, it was surely a source of fresh air during the Trump impeachments when the bias of both Fox News & Business made their shows mostly a fictional defense of Trump.

Your 'business school case study' discussion needs to consider the fact that right now is a very poor time to start up a streaming service, regardless of the quality of the CNN+ service itself. Look at what just happened at Netflix earlier this week with the drop in subscribers. The market is simply reaching saturation. Also, give CNN credit for cleaning house of Cuomo, Zucker and even his girlfriend -- but this meant that CNN+ lost its brainchild Zucker. Let's not forget there was a time when Zucker was a wunderkind [1]. At the same time, the fee structure was poorly thought out and the material just wasn't there.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCJn4giT9c

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/endurance-of-jeff-zu...

briandear
Also, you don’t learn about the market after the fact. Spending $300 million requires one to know the market long before. And the executives as CNN clearly didn’t do their homework. Predicting failure can be hard, but creating a paid streaming service for a network already getting hammered in the ratings was pretty foolish. It was like an abused spouse thinking that getting pregnant would suddenly stop the abuse. They should fix CNN itself, build an audience, then try to further monetize with CNN+. They did it backwards.
dtagames
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
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
You see. This is why it failed.
yreg
Sounds like something that could be fixed.
BitwiseFool
Even if CNN+ had an incredibly effective advertising campaign, I just don't think the product they are trying to sell is that compelling for most people.
theklr
This. CNN has loss the gravitas it believes it has to foolishly have the hubris to believe there’s enough people to see their “anchors” do side/passion/fluff work. If it was bundled with the full channel they may have been able to, but unlike ESPN+, they don’t have content for an audience that would succumb to their efforts.

Edit: ex-CEO Jeff Zucker and old execs made the decision. If you look at the photos online of the teams, it was clear that this outcome was inevitable.

markoman
If you're thinking that Fox is the home of American Wholesomeness and Truth, you should note that CNN hired Chris Wallace from them, after all, just for CNN+.
Aqueous
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
"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".

Shalomboy
It's only been out for 1 month though; that isn't enough time to generate intrigue. Look at how long Apple TV+ has taken to get up and running with good original content.
syntheticnature
The big thing is that normally a merger would have delayed or cancelled a project like this, scheduled to begin so close to the merger. This was probably someone's pet project where the only hope for it was to demonstrate it was profitable before the merger closed, which would have resulted in its preservation.
BitwiseFool
>"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
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
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
I don't understand why CNN+ was dropped so quickly I haven't heard of it until the pullback
jaywalk
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
Yeah the guy spearheading it left and everyone else could not wait to get rid of it.
the_snooze
>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
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_
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.
dhzhzjsbevs
300m marketing budget for less than 10k users.

Math?

gjsman-1000
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.)

dave78
> Chris Wallace gets a $9 million contract?? He's laughing his head off all the way to the bank.

I've seen rumors that he is livid. I think the type of personality that takes that job wants to be seen and heard - it's not just about money. He's likely plenty rich as is.

matwood
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
> What tech stack did you use?

CNN++ ofc

0des
Fuck it, it's Friday. You got me good here
2pointsomone
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
I think the bar for upvote receiving humor is just high on HN
shkkmo
Being funny is fine, but comments that are just jokes and don't actually try to contribute to the conversation are seen as off topic and often downvoted.
ransom1538
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
If it wasn't the proof they were way too in advanced in Machine Learning....
jupp0r
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
C++ is a programming language.
jupp0r
Ok, turns out I just maybe don't have humor :)
samspenc
Don't worry, took me several seconds to parse it too :) Somehow the extra + (like C++) went through some cognitive filter.
Tr3nton
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
So Fox News' business model :)
Covzire
"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
Replace SSRIs with Gold and Reverse Mortgages and then you've got the comparison correct. :)
nerdawson
>their business model is to enrage their viewers with sensationalism or outright propaganda

You've just described all news media.

dominotw
not nytimes. One of the very few places not relying on outrage revenue.
heartbreak
NYT has its own issues, but you’ll only hear about them from real Americans in Ohio.
BitwiseFool
NYT only does those kinds of stories when they want to tug at your heartstrings. I always find it amusing whenever there is an article and they have real people standing in these very carefully posed photographs with excessive HDR effects.
nerdawson
I don’t think the NY Times gets a pass here. Look at some of the reporting they do on tech and startups in particular.

Organisations relying on subscription revenue aren’t under quite the same degree of pressure but engagement is still important to them and journalists that can deliver it will be rewarded.

Ourgon
You mean the '1619' project NYT, peddling a fake history of your country by a faux historian as The Truth™, making the author the de-facto editor in chief of what used to be one of the cornerstones of solid journalism? The gray old lady is surely turning in her grave for the imposter which claims her name can not be her.
markoman
The '1619 Project' is peddled clearly as an essay project -- quite clearly differentiated from a pure news orientation. The essays were pretty light fare and nothing like overly sympathetic eyewitness reporting from the deck of a slave ship. Perhaps the NYT thinks that the country that unwaveringly holds itself out as the greatest country in the history of history (and the bastion and promise of liberty and democracy, still) can look inward and assess the legacy of slavery and the impacts felt today. One essay touched on whether race had a bearing on why the U.S. never adopted universal healthcare, which at least seems to be a worthwhile question.

American introspection is a notoriously unwelcome commodity by a people much more at home shouting 'USA USA USA!', often as a means to drown out any opposing speech.

Ourgon
There is a big difference between "introspection" and "revisionism". The '1619 Project' clearly falls in the latter category and as such deserves to be denounced for the fraud it is, as does its author. As to it being published as an "essay project", the NYT themselves presented it as [The 1619 project is] a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American Slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.

The gray old lady would never have published this. The current incarnation of the NYT is related to its predecessor in name only.

markoman
The stories are in the NY Times Magazine and not the mainline NY Times and are a 'reframing' of historical event viewed in the context of slavery. I get that this is a sensitive topic and often is interpreted as an attempt to make Americans feel guilty about their nation's past. How Germany approaches study of their Nazi history in schools is surprisingly less problematic, apparently because of this history's unequivocal evil.

Still, you suggest that the NY Times is revising history and you call it a 'fraud'. I suppose you wouldn't mind offering some examples of the misstatements made in the 1619 Project stories.

pc86
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
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.
pc86
> Your political leaning might influence which batch of toxicity you describe more

And that's bad, and we should try to combat it whenever possible without devolving into whataboutism.

lolinder
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
>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.

Tr3nton
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
> Their target audience is Boomers, and their business model is to enrage their viewers with sensationalism or outright propaganda

You just described Fox News.

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infamouscow
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.
markoman
Have you seen Netflix's stock this week? It's also just a really poor time to start up a streaming service.
infamouscow
HBO Max and Disney+ gained subscribers. It's only a bad time if you can't compete.
lappet
About time AWS offered a managed streaming service
crate_barre
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.