After only three weeks in existence, CNN has announced that it will be shutting down its streaming service, CNN Plus.
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CNN Plus launched on March 29, 2022, but it was announced on April 21 that the service will be shutting down by the end of the month.
Since its launch, CNN Plus has struggled to find an audience with some estimates saying that it had garnered somewhere between 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers. In an industry that normally measures success in hundreds of millions, this was not an auspicious start for the new service.
This marks the fastest closure of a streaming service by a considerable amount. The previous record was held by Quibi which lasted for seven months in 2020.
This closure comes less than two weeks after the merging of two companies to form Warner Bros. Discovery. New CEO David Zaslav is looking to cut expenditures, and it seems unlikely a struggling streaming service with a first-year budget of $350M was going to escape his gaze.
CNN Plus staff will continue to receive salary and benefits for another 90 days and have been invited to look for positions within the main CNN company.
