CNN+ For Life = $2.99, Why Was RT On So Many U.S. Carriers Anyway?

1. CNN+ For Life = $2.99

Pricing has been announced for Discovery Warner’s new CNN+ app and early adopters can get a very good deal.

The app, which will launch later this month, will initially cost just $2.99/month and (more innovatively) viewers who subscribe at that intro rate are then locked in to that low price for life, provided they don’t let their subscription lapse. 

The price goes up to $5.99/month once that deal expires.

Why It Matters

News and sports are the two genres keeping many people tied to traditional pay TV. 

And the Ukrainian invasion has no doubt reminded people of just how important access to national news is to them during a time of crisis.

While CBS and NBC have both launched their own free news services and ABC News has their 24 hour service on Hulu, those are less 24/7 news channels than a mix of some live news programming and a passel of repackaged clips, while CNN+ promises to be primarily news reporting and original programming.

Point being, the launch of the CNN+ launch could not be coming at a better time, especially given the changing of the guard there and the chatter around how the new chief, Chris Licht, wants to put the emphasis back on news and away from opinion. 

While the service will launch with some lifestyle shows (e.g., Eva Longoria’s Mexican food and travel show), others will be more news focused and the network will presumably have the option of just running the standard CNN feed during times of crisis, which, given the current situation in Ukraine, will likely prove to be a key selling point.

Fox News, CNN’s main competitor in the national news space has a paid app called Fox Nation that veers in the other direction—mostly talk shows with conservative hosts and documentaries and network reruns that presumably appeal to older conservative audiences.

The key to the different strategies is that Fox seems to be looking not to anger the various MVPDs who carry its linear network, many of whom are starting to come under some pressure to drop the service due to what activists see as its role in spreading The Big Lie, vaccine misinformation and, as of late, pro-Putin propaganda. While that movement has yet to gain any real traction, it does give the MVPDs yet another tool to use during carriage fee negotiations and Fox yet another reason not to piss them off.

That said, Fox has not released any viewership figures for the app, leading to the assumption that subscriber numbers are quite low, likely under the 1MM mark.

Which brings up one last issue CNN+ will have to face: given that the average age of cable news viewers for all channels is over 60, they will need to find ways to attract a younger audience. As noted, the Ukrainian invasion may provide a massive boost with that, as younger audiences, cord-cutters in particular, want to be tied into a round-the-clock national news service during times of crisis.

So once again, timing is everything.

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re a consumer and you think you may give up traditional pay TV at some point, $2.99 is a very good deal. Especially since it will be ad-free, and if you’ve ever had to sit through five minutes blocks of pharma ads on CNN (and pharma ads often seem to be the only ads that run on CNN) the price is well worth it.

If you’re Discovery-Warner, kudos on the pricing play. Giving people an opportunity to lock in at a very low price is likely to get you a whole lot of uptake, even from people who currently still have a pay TV subscription but figure they may want to give it up at some point. And then there are people like me who just want to avoid the ads.

While you’re at it, a campaign to promote the new service that makes use of the various smart TV OEMs and streaming devices will be a smart move—advertising on a smart TV home screen is about as close as you can get to point-of-purchase. Plus you get all that data.

If you’re one of the broadcast networks, time to up your news game. Focusing on your ability to deliver local and national news in many markets will be key, as will a content offering that doesn’t often look like an afterthought.

2. Why Was RT On So Many U.S. Carriers Anyway?

MVPDs and OEMs across the Western world are quickly dumping RT (Russia Today) the  English-language TV service that is accused of being nothing more than a Russian propaganda outlet.

Which raises the question “if that is the case, why are they carrying them in the first place?

Why It Matters

That’s a complicated question with several right answers. 

One is that the service may not have looked like a propaganda outlet at first glance, especially to content acquisition teams that were looking to beef up their news offerings.

To be fair, the channel is not 24/7 propaganda—RT America featured a talk show with comedian Dennis Miller (past tense—Miller dropped the show a few days back) as well as shows with Star Trek’s William Shatner (he’s 90!) and former MN governor/pro wrestler Jesse Ventura, along with broader sports and entertainment coverage.

OTOH, it is funded by the Kremlin, which should have given everyone a clue right off the bat. The whole scorpion and frog thing and all that.

The fact that RT America lived on so many streaming services is of particular note, given the growing level of concern about brand safety and programmatic buying on those platforms. 

It will only add to brands' concerns about transparency in CTV, the fact that they rarely have any idea as to where and when their programmatically bought CTV ads are actually running. There’s now the additional concern that something that seems relatively brand safe—a talk show with a well-known former TV star and travel website spokesman—may turn out to be a viper’s nest of Russian propaganda. 

And while that is the extreme case, there are many instances of shows whose quality is far below that of the network TV reruns and classic movies that dominate CTV.

This issue will likely go away as the entire CTV ecosystem grows and lower quality programming fades away, but it will remain an issue for the short term.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are in content acquisition, think twice about spending money on a network funded by a foreign government, one suspected of interfering in U.S. elections.

If you are the ad team at a streaming device OEM or an aggregator app, be aware of what is running on your platform and understand that it’s important for advertisers to know the type of content their ads are running against, precisely because the programming available on CTV varies so widely in terms of quality and brand safety these days. It’s why contextual advertising on CTV promises to be so important.

If you are one of the services that dropped RT this week, congrats. While it is important to have a range of viewpoints and the free marketplace of ideas, that most certainly does not need to include propaganda.