8 ms·
Ask HN: CNN+ Software Engineers
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?
- crate_barre 5y agoWhat 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.
- sidcool 5y agoWhy what happened with CNN+? And what is CNN+?
- johnthuss 5y agoIt’s a streaming news service. It is shutting down. https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/21/media/cnn-shutting-down/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/21/media/cnn-shutting-down/index...
- Trouble_007 5y ago> And what is CNN+?< CNN+ : <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN+>
- ushakov 5y agohttps://www.wsj.com/articles/warner-bros-discovery-is-shutting-down-cnn-streaming-service-11650556680 https://www.wsj.com/articles/warner-bros-discovery-is-shutti...
- gus_massa 5y ago"CNN+ streaming service is shutting down a month after launching" https://www.wsj.com/articles/warner-bros-discovery-is-shutting-down-cnn-streaming-service-11650556680 https://www.wsj.com/articles/warner-bros-discovery-is-shutti... (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111276 | 285 points | 21 hours ago | 310 comments)
- boredumb 5y agoIt 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 5y agoAfter a month you don't know much about the market. Seems like someone wanted it dead from the beginning.
- briandear 5y agoCNN+ 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.
- dtagames 5y agoI'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 5y agoQuibi 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 5y agoYou see. This is why it failed.
- yreg 5y agoSounds like something that could be fixed.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoEven 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 5y agoThis. 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 5y agoIf 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 5y agoCNN+ 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-sources/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/21/media/cnn-streaming-reliable-...
- jerf 5y 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".
- Shalomboy 5y agoIt'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.
- brimble 5y agoA 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 5y agoSince 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 5y agoI don't understand why CNN+ was dropped so quickly I haven't heard of it until the pullback
- jaywalk 5y agoBecause 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 5y agoYeah the guy spearheading it left and everyone else could not wait to get rid of it.
- the_snooze 5y 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 5y agoIMO 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_ 5y agoVictim 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.
- mrmanner 5y ago> What tech stack did you use? CNN++ ofc
- 0des 5y agoFuck it, it's Friday. You got me good here
- 2pointsomone 5y agoI 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 5y agoI think the bar for upvote receiving humor is just high on HN
- shkkmo 5y agoBeing 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 5y agoMy 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 5y agoIf it wasn't the proof they were way too in advanced in Machine Learning....
- jupp0r 5y agoSorry I don't understand the joke, but it must be quite funny according to my peer comments. Can you explain it to me?
- Tr3nton 5y agoThis 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.
- nerdawson 5y ago>their business model is to enrage their viewers with sensationalism or outright propaganda You've just described all news media.
- dominotw 5y agonot nytimes. One of the very few places not relying on outrage revenue.
- heartbreak 5y agoNYT has its own issues, but you’ll only hear about them from real Americans in Ohio.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoNYT 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 5y agoI 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 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- infamouscow 5y agoTo 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 5y agoHave you seen Netflix's stock this week? It's also just a really poor time to start up a streaming service.
- infamouscow 5y agoHBO Max and Disney+ gained subscribers. It's only a bad time if you can't compete.
- lappet 5y agoAbout time AWS offered a managed streaming service