The company also announced CNN+ head Andrew Morse is leaving Warner Bros. Discovery after a transition period. Alex MacCallum, currently CNN+’s general manager and head of product, will lead CNN Digital after Morse departs.

WarnerMedia launched the standalone news service less than a month ago on March 29. It had garnered fewer than 10,000 daily active viewers about two weeks after its launch, CNBC reported last week. The company said customers will receive prorated refunds on subscription fees.

New CNN head Chris Licht has been working behind the scenes with other executives at Warner Bros. Discovery for several weeks to analyze a streaming strategy for CNN, according to a person familiar with the matter. The decision to shut down CNN+ is based on his recommendation, the person said, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private.

Licht will address CNN staffers directly at a meeting Thursday, the people said. Licht’s official start date is May 1.

CNNhas already invested hundreds of millions of dollars on new talent and programming for CNN+. Some of that programming will move to HBO Max and other series may live on CNN.com, according to the person familiar with the changes. Some new talent may assume roles on CNN’s linear station, they said, but Licht will make those determinations in the coming weeks.

In an internal memo, Licht told CNN+ employees they will “continue to be paid and receive benefits for the next 90 days to explore opportunities at CNN, CNN Digital and elsewhere in the Warner Bros. Discovery family. At the end of that period, any departing CNN+ employee will receive a minimum of six-month severance (depending on length of service at CNN).”

Warner Bros. Discovery leadership wants to use CNN programming to bolster a larger streaming bundle that will combine the best of WarnerMedia and Discovery, as CNBC has previously reported.

On March 29, outgoing WarnerMedia Chief Executive Officer Jason Kilar said in a series of tweets that CNN+ was “as important to the mission of CNN as the linear channel service has been these past 42 years. It would be hard to overstate how important this moment is for CNN.”

One month later, nearly to the day, CNN+ will cease to exist.

Meanwhile, less than five full days in, influential TV business writer Joe Adalian described CNN Plus as, well, giving off “Quibi vibes,” an overpriced service with no identifiable segment in a crowded streaming market.

The abiding question, as the environment for CNN Plus is set to change dramatically, is whether the nascent service will get a chance to survive and thrive.

Promotion for the new service didn’t start until just a few weeks before launch. Just a couple of weeks out, the company finally announced pricing, saying it would charge $2.99 for life for pioneer subscribers, and double that for everyone else coming in after the first month.

Access to the service is tucked into CNN’s app as a button, which might improve discoverability by serious fans but won’t do much for visibility to broader audiences.

Contributing to the low profile, there haven’t been many executive interviews about the service, either. Possibly, that’s because of the sudden departure earlier this year of CNN chairman Jeff Zucker, who created CNN Plus but got crosswise with corporate policies after he and chief marketing officer Allison Gollust didn’t disclose their personal relationship. The departure of both just two months ago has to have undercut some of the initiatives planned for the service.

So what will subscribers get for their money?

“We are a streaming platform and we are leaning into what streaming does best, which is giving our subscribers the choice,” CNN Plus programming chief Rebecca Kutler told Adweek. But as we’re seeing with the rapid rise of free, ad-supported TV services, turning it on and leaving it on is a big benefit for many fans of CNN, Fox News Channel and other basic-cable networks.

WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar said in a Twitter thread this week that he’d “never seen the totality of CNN and its journalism on display — in service of audiences — like it is through CNN Plus.”

Sounds good, but it’s patently not true — or, perhaps, not nearly true enough, certainly at the listed monthly subscription price.

Yes, many of the long-time personalities on the cable mothership are Plussing up with new programs, like Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer or Fareed Zakaria. But you can’t watch Tapper’s CNN show, or Zakaria’s, or Cooper’s or Blitzer’s show on CNN Plus, either on-demand or live.

CNN Plus also offers shows from high-profile Plus-only hires, including Fox News veteran Chris Wallace and long-time NPR voice Audie Cornish. And there are a few hundred documentaries culled from the libraries of CNN, HBO and other outlets that previously were largely available elsewhere.

But if you’re looking for something similar to what HBO Max is to HBO, i.e., everything from the cable original as well as a bunch of other great stuff, you’re out of luck. CNN Plus is more like CNN Minus.

If you want to catch up on the latest news from Ukraine, the pandemic, politics or otherwise, for instance, you probably won’t turn to CNN Plus, which doesn’t really have any ongoing presence in, you know, news.

There’s no go-to place for roundups of the day’s news, or a regular newscast. If you see breaking news, it’s mostly a happy accident of timing. There’s not enough there for newshounds to feed their daily need, or even many fans’ desire for a daily companion playing in the background.

Nor is there any local news, unlike what you can routinely find from the increasingly competent FAST services from the broadcast network news outlets, never mind such local aggregators as Newsy or Sinclair’s STIRR.

CNN Plus is in pretty much the same contractual limbo that limits Fox Nation, the super-fan subscription service that Fox News launched more than three years ago. Both companies make vast sums from cable operators and understandably won’t risk that revenue with an upstart streaming service with far more modest immediate revenue opportunities.

Fox still hasn’t released subscriber data on Fox Nation, but likes to point reporters to one analyst’s estimates that it has 1 million subscribers. Whether that’s accurate or current is impossible to know. Regardless, it’s hardly a smashing first few years for the SVOD service from the most-watched cable-news service, and suggests a possible ceiling on uptake for CNN Plus too, at least as currently configured.

As it is, CNN Plus distribution is rather limited. The service debuted on Amazon’s Fire devices and the Apple TV OS platform, which together reach about a quarter of U.S. homes.

It’s not on Roku, with its roughly 45 million U.S households, in something of a reprise of corporate sibling HBO Max’s hobbled launch about two years ago. After several months of disputes, HBO Max finally appeared on Roku, and also began to clear up its other shortcomings in originals productions, branding confusion and more.

These days, I’d argue, HBO Max is one of the must-have streaming services, with a wide array of programming from across the WarnerMedia universe. Less clear is whether CNN Plus follows the HBO Max arc to success, or the Quibi arc to failure, over the next couple of years.

The future Warner Bros. Discovery clearly plans to bundle in various ways its direct-to-consumer holding — HBO Max, Discovery Plus and perhaps CNN Plus — once the merger closes in a few weeks. That can be powerful stuff, as we’ve seen with Disney’s increasing efforts to bundle its three very different streaming services.

In another Kilar tweet, 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.”

Then we’ll see if CNN Plus can attract enough interest and income to remain a standalone operation, survives as an add-on/afterthought to the HBO Max bell cow, or heads to history’s ash-heap alongside Katzenberg’s Folly.

Kilar, who almost certainly is headed out the door post-merger, tweeted 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.”

Maybe. Or maybe under incoming Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, facing a mountain of debt and other challenges, and minus chief advocate Zucker, time is already running out for CNN Plus.

Out the gate, we suddenly learned that CNN Plus lacks distribution not only on the all-powerful Roku platform, but also Android TV/Google TV devices, Samsung and LG smart TVs, and PlayStation and Xbox game consoles. This week, AT&T rolled out its newest subscription-video initiative, CNN Plus, just weeks before it spins off WarnerMedia’s many entertainment, sports and news divisions to an uncertain future merged with another basic-cable fixture, Discovery Media, and something like $48 billion in gross debt.

In the run-up to its March 29 launch, CNN Plus received a modest amount of ballyhoo (mostly from other journalists speculating about a new place to work with outsized paychecks), a set of original shows with very big names and a late-to-market business strategy complicated by both that merger and the sudden departure of the old media stalwart who dreamed up the service in the first place.

That wasn’t promising. But it got even worse last week.

With limited app distribution, no clear market segment and soon-to-be boss David Zaslav stepping into a mountain of debt, the first-week ‘vibes’ sure weren’t good.

Two years ago, give or take a few pandemic-crushed weeks, the subscription-video startup Quibi launched with a fair amount of ballyhoo, a modest string of originals featuring very big names, and a late-to-market business strategy from an old media stalwart that was wildly out of sync with rapidly evolving viewing habits. Within the year, Quibi was dead, its library sold to Roku for nickels on the dollar and its investors fortunate to get back even a small share of their mad money.

Among them: Rivals already have staked their space in the streaming universe. The subscription streaming service needs more must-have programming to lure customers already satiated in monthly fees. And CNN+ is launching just weeks from the network getting a new parent, with the combination of Discovery and WarnerMedia, along with new leadership, with Chris Licht scheduled to take over as the network’s new leader in May.

Yet Andrew Morse, Executive VP and Chief Digital Officer, who leading CNN+, is insistent that what the service offers will be unlike anything else out there.

“We are not trying to launch just another streaming service,” he said in an interview late last week. “What we are building is the most essential and engaging direct-to-consumer news subscription service. There is not another news product like this on the market. … We’re not trying to compete with entertainment streaming services.”

The monthly subscription is priced at $5.99, the same as Fox News’ Fox Nation, which launched in 2018, but CNN also is offering a 50% lifetime discount for those who sign up in the first month.

Morse said they have a “very ambitious but achievable subscriber target,” and while he declined to disclose the exact figure, he confirmed that a bundle offering with HBO Max is “on our roadmap for later this year.”

“The real opportunity for us is this company has the fastest-growing entertainment streaming service,” he said. “So the ability to bundle CNN+ alongside HBO Max and obviously Discovery Plus coming into the family, it is a really exciting proposition for us.”

CNN+ will have a mix of new faces and those from the linear network.

Last week, it unveiled its daily and weekend lineup, which includes at 11 a.m. ET show hosted by Brian Stelter; a 6 p.m. interview series with Chris Wallace; and a 7:30 p.m. newscast with Wolf Blitzer, one of the longest-tenured on-air CNN personalities. Another selling point is CNN+’s mix of lifestyle, documentary and CNN Original Series offerings, including shows headlined by Scott Galloway, Rex Chapman, Jemele Hill and Cari Champion. Plans also are for Eva Longoria to headline a series in the vein of Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy, this one titled Searching for Mexico, along with another featuring cooking author Alison Roman. The service also will have an on-demand library that includes episodes of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and documentaries like RBG.

One of the CNN+ originals at debut will be The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, which seems to be a shot across the bow at a network rival, but Morse says it’s a “really gripping family drama. I would describe it as a real-life Succession.”

There also are in development live events, among them a debate in conjunction with the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate, and one source said that in the works is a rhetorical matchup between Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders.

“We actually think the debate format would be great for CNN+,” Morse said. “Everybody loves a good debate, and actually I think debates can go far beyond politics, and creating real live subscriber moments will be important for us. So you will see us experimenting with original live programming.”

Breaking news events, Morse said, will feature CNN+-only content — not a simulcast of CNN feeds, while he downplayed the potential complications of determining when a reporter is working for the linear network and when they are doing something for CNN+.

The live coverage “will have distinct anchors. It will have distinct reporting,” he said. “Of course, we are going to leverage and lean on the global reporting resources of CNN. It’s one of our distinct advantages. So you will see our A-team of reporters on our programs for CNN+, but you will see fresh and distinctive news programming.”

He added that “what you won’t see us do is just sitting anchors behind a desk and do a facsimile of what we do on CNN. That would not really serve anyone. I think what the CNN U.S. network does best is the what, why and when. It really is unparalleled in terms of up to the minute breaking news reporting. With CNN+, and having a nonlinear platform, what we will be able to do is really to be able to spend more time on the how and the why.” He cited a show hosted by Sara Sidner, called The Big Picture, which will be a daily, 45-minute single-topic deep dive.

“There isn’t anything like that on cable television today, because that is not what cable television is built for,” he said “So we have the ability with different formats and different lengths and different presentations to really supplement what we do on the linear network with original programming.”

The Associated Press reported that CNN had sunk nearly $100 million in development costs to CNN+, though a spokesperson said that the figure is less than that. About 500 people are working on the streaming service, though several hundred have duties that overlap with other CNN platforms.

One of the biggest talent “gets” for CNN+ was Chris Wallace, who then-CNN President Jeff Zucker lured from Fox News when Wallace’s contract ended there. Wallace’s nighttime interview show, Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?, features lengthy interviews with figures from politics, business and entertainment. The set is almost as spartan as that of Charlie Rose’s public broadcasting show, and the time slot is the same as that of Larry King’s longtime CNN series, but Wallace does have a bit more of a prosecutorial style. An interview with Bob Iger, for instance, touches on current and past Walt Disney Co. controversies. Further attention to the four-night-a-week show came over the weekend, when Wallace told The New York Times that he “no longer felt comfortable with the programming” at Fox News, specifically Tucker Carlson and a January 6th documentary he did for Fox Nation called Patriot Purge.

Chris Wallace On His Move To CNN+: “No Longer Felt Comfortable With The Programming At Fox”

Yet a challenge for CNN+, as it is with all network ventures into streaming, will be to establish itself as the brand for the next generation of news consumers, particularly those who are done with cable and satellite subscriptions. In that regard, there is concern about how high a priority younger audiences place on getting news programming as part of their streaming diet.

Kevin Westcott, who leads the U.S. technology, media and telecom practice at Deloitte, predicts a dramatic “re-aggregation” across the industry in the coming years. While he offered no specific outlook on whether CNN+ would be absorbed by HBO Max, Westcott envisions perhaps a half-dozen mega-services offering news, entertainment, sports, games and music in a single package.

“When direct-to-consumer began a few years ago, it was a rush to get to every niche. We identified more than 300 unique streaming services in the U.S.,” Westcott told Deadline. “But the average household had only four of them. There was just too much out there.”

Perhaps the biggest question for CNN+ is whether news as a category is a compelling subscriber draw, given the profusion of free services in the market, not to mention on the internet. It also is not clear whether cord-cutters would automatically be drawn to CNN+.

Leichtman Research Group found in an online study of 4,400 adult consumers of video that 56% of people who subscribe to a pay-TV package indicated that news programming is “very important.” Among cord-cutters, the number was only 32%.

Bruce Leichtman, the president of LRG, also points out that news also skews older by definition, with 66% of people ages 55 and older rating news as “very important” to overall household video viewing, compared with 32% for the 18-34 demo. Westcott notes that Gen Z and millennial news consumers also have a “trust issue” with news, especially what is fed to them in social media.

Morse said that such numbers “change dramatically when something important happens in the world. So when there is Covid or there is Ukraine or when there is a presidential election, if you were to take that survey in the midst of one of those crises, I think the numbers would be quite different, because people we know of all ages get CNN online and on television when they need us the most.”

Moreover, he said, people will subscribe to CNN+ “for a lot of different reasons,” adding that some may want it for their daily news habit, others for food and travel programming, or those who follow personalities like Chapman and Galloway.

He makes comparisons to what The New York Times did “transitioning its business from a legacy newspaper company into a digital subscription powerhouse. They built a really healthy business.”

Fox News has not announced subscriber figures for Fox Nation, but that too features a mix of lifestyle programming and its linear network personalities, including Tucker Carlson, who has a separate interview show, as well as the his documentary unit Tucker Carlson Originals. Last year, Fox Nation began offering on-demand episodes of its top primetime shows, including Hannity, Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle, the day after they are shown on Fox News. That is also something that MSNBC plans to do with some of its shows, as it creates a new hub for Peacock Premium subscribers.

“Any company now has to have one foot in the present and one foot in the future,” Leichtman said. “The thing is, the two feet are not equal. The challenge is, how do we do that?”

Fox News “has a certain slant to it,” he added.” Their consumers want more of that slant. CNN is quite the opposite. They’re not trying to have one dimension.”

Morse said that “what Fox Nation has evolved into makes sense for the Fox subscriber. It really has leaned into, and has led, with the kind of partisan opinion that network does very well and is really known for. As that service has grown, they have clearly doubled down on that, and I think their lifestyle programming is geared toward the core Fox audience.

“For us, we are a different organization. Our ambition is to build the most essential and engaging digital news subscription service, and the fact that we are global gives us a really distinct advantage. The fact that we have more journalists in more places around the world than just about any news organization gives us a really distinct advantage.” In addition to CNN’s news legacy, he cited the networks decade long investments in original series and documentaries. He also said that they have “invested heavily in product development and technology and digital design and analytics and marketing — all of which are key components to being able to run and operate a global subscription service.”

For WarnerMedia, the launch of CNN+ as a stand-alone service is a significant departure from years of strategic moves as it has focused on HBO Max. The company unplugged FilmStruck and DC Universe in 2018 and 2020, respectively, rerouting some of their programming to HBO Max, which ended 2021 with 73.8 million global subscribers when combined with linear HBO. Parent company AT&T also sold anime brand Crunchyroll and its 5 million streaming subscribers to Sony.

Some large media companies have continued to operate targeted streaming services alongside much broader ones – examples include NBCUniversal with NBC Sports Gold and Peacock and Paramount Global with BET+ and Noggin alongside Paramount+.

But the trend undoubtedly has been toward consolidation, especially as a way to lessen the financial burdens of streaming. There is frequent speculation — publicly rebuffed by Disney — that 15-year-old mainstay Hulu could soon end up as a vertical within the much larger, globally distributed Disney+.

And Discovery, which has promised to deliver $3 billion in cost savings once the WarnerMedia deal closes in the coming weeks, already has been in streamlining mode. It combined Eurosport Player, a major European service, with flagship Discovery+ and has signaled a plan to blend Discovery+ with HBO Max down the road.

Morse doesn’t discount the possibility of changes as the new ownership and leadership takes charge, and he also promises more hiring announcements. “We are in active conversations right now with some really terrific talent,” he said.

He said they have not yet met with Licht or David Zaslav, who will lead Warner Bros. Discovery, but added, “I imagine we will sit down and we will have great conversations about the future and we will think of things that we haven’t begun to contemplate yet, and I’m really excited about that.”

What they didn’t want to do is delay the launch.

“We have been building this product for quite a while. We have a launch plan,” Morse said. “We have a schedule. We have commitments that we’ve made. We’re ready, so we’re very excited to launch the service.”

The Financial Times, which said it obtained the information from inside sources, described the outlay as a “$350 million bet” on the new CNN Plus streaming service, one that soon-to-be Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav will seriously have to ponder as he looks to trim his combined company’s nearly $55 billion of debt.

Speaking to FT, one unnamed CNN executive said that Kilar “told us to keep going. The question is: what is Discovery’s commitment to it?

With CNN internally still grappling with the abrupt departure of popular CEO Jeff Zucker in January, immediate budgetary scrutiny by Zaslav and his team could prove to be dicey.

“The morale is already in the toilet,” the CNN exec told FT. “So if you decide, as your first move, to kill, change or delay CNN Plus? That’s a very complicated decision for Discovery.”

Perhaps a better question for Zaslav and his team: If they think $350 million is a lot to spend on a new entry into the ultra-competitive streaming wars, what are they going to think about HBO Max’s budget?

It’s notable that when WarnerMedia launched HBO Max two years ago, the conglomerate promised to spend $4 billion on the streaming service over the ensuing three years.

In its ambitious run-up to launch Disney Plus in November 2019, Disney reportedly spent $3 billion on technology and content. And in 2024, the media company will reportedly spend between $14 billion - $16 billion on content across Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus.

Even Comcast, which has been known to spend more modestly on Peacock, committed $2 billion over the service’s first two years on the market.