After spending months keeping CNN from expanding into streaming, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery appears to have changed its mind.
Warner Bros. Discovery is exploring ways to get more CNN programing on to its Max streaming service, according to a person familiar with the matter, looking at the news outlet’s broader portfolio to see what content might work. Executives will have to navigate agreements with CNN’s traditional distributors that often require cable and satellite companies get first access to CNN’s live broadcasts.
Yet CNN’s rivals have grappled with similar obstacles and found ways to repurpose the news and opinion shows they run. The Fox Nation streaming outlet runs Fox News Channel’s opinion programs a day later. Fox News in 2020 unveiled a new international service that puts its programs in countries such as Mexico and Spain. MSBNC in March of last year unveiled a plan to offer episodes of “Morning Joe,” “Deadline: White House,” “The Beat with Ari Melber,” “The ReidOut,” “All In with Chris Hayes” and MSNBC’s opinion programs on the Peacock streaming hub on-demand the day after they air on cable.
CNN declined to make executives available for comment. Bloomberg previously reported on Warner Bros. Discovery’s efforts.
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CNN had built a robust streaming offering. CNN+, the last major project launched under the auspices of the network’s former top executive, Jeff Zucker, debuted in March of last year, stocked with new programs from anchors like Jake Tapper, Brian Stelter and Kate Bolduan. CNN went on a hiring spree, luring Kasie Hunt from NBC News and Audie Cornish from NPR, along with Chris Wallace from Fox News Channel. Within weeks of a takeover of WarnerMedia by Discovery Communications, however, the project was scrapped.
The new move appears to recognize that the business of CNN needs to expand beyond its linear roots — and quickly. Pew Research Center found in a 2022 survey that adults under 30 are almost as likely to trust information from social media sites as they are to trust information from national news outlets, with half of 18- to 29-year-olds in the United States expressing “some or a lot of trust” in the information they get from social media sites, compared with 56% who say the same about information from national news organizations.
What’s more, CNN faces a tougher environment for capturing advertising dollars. CNN is projected to see 2023 ad revenue fall about 5%, to $562.6 million, according to Kagan, a market-research unit of S&P Global Intelligence, and the network has suffered from noticeable declines in viewership in recent months. In the second quarter, CNN’s primetime schedule has seen a 14% decline in overall viewership, according to data from Nielsen, as well as 19% decrease among viewers between 25 and 54 — the demographic most coveted by advertisers in news programming.
Some of CNN’s content has been available Warner Bros. Discovery streaming hubs like Max or Discovery+ for months. Chris Wallace’s”Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace” is distributed both on Max and on CNN. The new Sunday documentary program, “The Whole Story,” is also available for streaming, as are several of the original documentary series and films produced by CNN over the past decade.
In some instances, CNN makes its live feeds available to everyone, including people who don’t have a cable subscription. But these occasions tend to be reserved for big, breaking-news events, like coverage of a presidential election or national emergency. In other cases, CNN and other news networks will make short clips of live coverage available on social media — typically a while after the content already runs on cable.
