As Kilar Exits, CNN+ Is On The Clock

It’s about time, in so many ways.

A week after overseeing a low-wattage launch of CNN+, and 6 days before WarnerMedia merges with Discovery and his job disappears, Jason Kilar said he wishes he had more time.

“The biggest wish that I have when I go to sleep, and it’s often late, I wish there more than 24 hours a day,” Kilar said in a valedictory CNBC interview minutes after announcing his Friday exit as WarnerMedia CEO (AT&T will spin-off WarnerMedia into the merged Warner Bros. Discovery on Monday). “If there’s one thing I could wish for, it’s more time.”

Kilar has had a transformative, even convulsive, two-year run as head of one of Hollywood’s oldest and biggest studios. He arrived less than a month before the studio’s botched launch of streaming service HBO Max, and soon pushed out several of the executives responsible. Eventually, HBO Max cleared up its confusing branding, restored a pandemic-clogged production pipeline, and saw viewership take off. The service now claims 74 million subscribers, fourth among the big subscription services.

Along the way, Kilar battered down and reorganized the defiantly siloed operations of Warner’s many entertainment units, ushered many long-time executives into retirement, and definitively focused the company on its streaming future.

He also enraged many in Hollywood by putting the entire 2021 Warner movie slate on HBO Max simultaneously with their theatrical debuts, launched an ad-supported tier of HBO MAX and, after firing CNN Chairman Jeff Zucker for not disclosing a workplace relationship, overaw the CNN+ debut last week after nearly two years of development. The launch date was set 18 months ago, he said.

While it’s certain that HBO Max will survive the changeover to a merged Warner Bros. Discovery (and indeed will be its essential bell cow), the future of CNN+ is less certain. It’s indeed possible Kilar’s newest subscription service was launched last week to make sure it got a chance to launch at all.

David Zaslav takes over as WBD’s CEO on Monday with an urgent mission to wring at least $3 billion in promised annual “synergies” — i.e., more cuts — from the merged operation.

Zaslav doesn’t have lots of time to dither either.

For all its “the stuff that dreams are made of” hype, WBD will emerge into the world with a very undreamy $48 billion in gross debt, and free cash flow of somewhat less than half that.

Without serious cuts, the company may need a decade or more to pay down the debt monkey. It will have to do that while financing its significant share of the extremely expensive content battle against deep-pocketed competitors Amazon, Apple, Disney and Netflix, even as its legacy operations in cable and theatrical continue to erode.

All of which means the clock is ticking on CNN+. Its very existence is at stake, something Kilar alluded to on launch day as part of a Twitter stream, writing that he’d been “reminding the team of the need to operate with a high sense of urgency, while *at the same time* never forgetting that building something of lasting importance does take time. The journey is just beginning.” 

In the CNBC interview, Kilar touted “the unusually positive trajectory of CNN+, most importantly the storytelling momentum” in the days since its launch last week. He added it was “ahead of my expectations in terms of where subscribers are and what the reception is… It’s not an exaggeration to say that’s the future of CNN. Anyone who doesn’t have a scalable, robust digital paid model” will have a difficult future.

But CNN+ launched with significant challenges, most importantly… a lack of distribution. The service debuted online and on Amazon Fire devices and Apple TV+. But it’s not on U.S. market-leader Roku, nor is it on Android TV/Google TV devices, Samsung, Vizio, Sony or LG Smart TVs, not to mention PlayStation and Xbox game consoles.

That’s… not promising.

And it’s not like HBO Max, which includes everything on HBO plus a whole lot of other great stuff (even including movies from Disney-owned Fox and Paramount Global TV series such as South Park under leftover distribution deals). CNN+ is more like CNN Minus.

You can’t access regular CNN programming unless you authorize your existing cable subscription, which then integrates those feeds. Without one, you can see some shows from CNN stalwarts such as Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, and Fareed Zakaria, but not the shows they make for CNN. There’s new talent, such as interview shows featuring Chris Wallace and Audie Cornish. And there’s even breaking news as it happens, just not any of the regular newscasts you might expect from, you know, a news organization.

So what is it?

“We are a streaming platform and we are leaning into what streaming does best, which is giving our subscribers the choice,” CNN+ programming chief Rebecca Kutler told Adweek.

Consumer choice matters more than ever in streaming, of course, a theme Kilar continued to hit even during his exit interview on CNBC.

In another tweet last week, he wrote, “Lots of opportunity (and convenience) awaits with the ability to also offer consumers the choice to combine CNN+ with/into HBO Max. In the end, the customer should always get to make that decision.”

And a vision of creating bundles of HBO Max, Discovery+ and CNN+ is certainly mentioned often enough that it’s almost certain to manifest in some fashion. Disney’s successful marketing around the bundle of Disney+, Hulu and the formerly struggling ESPN+ gives hope of some significant future role.

Even under Zaslav, the potential remains for bundles created for consumers who want a news component with their entertainment, “I suspect that won’t change with Discovery,” Kilar said.

As Zaslav surveys the debt-battered books of his new domain, it’s just not clear whether CNN+ remains something separate and standalone, or will quickly head to some different status rolled into an HBO SuperMax.

For his part, Kilar certainly has another act or two in his career, after presiding for five years over Hulu, launching online service Vessel, and then working at Amazon. He turns 51 later this month. Asked what advice he might have Zaslav as new CEO, Kilar said, “I’m always a believer in ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’… I’d say to start and end with storytelling, and stick to that knitting.”

Whether Zaslav listens, or even has the latitude to listen, is another issue altogether. The clock is ticking.