CNBC: “CNN+ struggles to lure viewers, drawing under 10,000 daily users”

CNN+ launched on March 29. The subscription news streaming service, which charges $5.99 a month or $59.99 annually, only became available on Roku on Monday and still isn’t on Android TV. Still, the paltry audience casts doubt on the future of the application following the recently completed combination of Discovery and WarnerMedia into Warner Bros. Discovery.

To put that daily user number in perspective, CNN’s cable network suffered a sharp decline in viewership last year but still rang up an average of 773,000 total viewers a day.

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It’s possible, if not likely, that CNN+ programming will be offered as part of a larger bundled offering of HBO Max and Discovery+, according to people familiar with the matter. Both of those services have millions of subscribers.

Ex-WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar decided to push ahead with CNN+’s launch two weeks before merging the company with Discovery. Kilar left the company last week. He was upbeat about subscriber numbers in an interview with CNBC, but didn’t cite any figures.

Alex Sherman

Speaking of the unchecked proliferation of streaming services, here is an indication that consumers are tiring of paying for new monthly plans with minuscule added value.

Bloomberg: “The Phone Company didn’t Destroy HBO. Will the Cable Guy?”

Many of the current streaming services will fold or merge.

There will be a winnowing. It’s going to happen over the next 24 to 36 months. In the same way that broadcast TV history had the emergence of three and then four with Fox in the US.  Even though streaming has unlimited shelf space, we’ll see three major scaled players when it comes to pure play storytelling companies. There will be increased separation between the leaders. I do believe WarnerMedia and specifically HBO, Disney and Netflix will separate themselves. The level of investment some folks are making is not sustainable.

Most customers will accept advertising for a lower price.

Close to 50% of every new [HBO Max] subscriber is choosing the ad tier. Hulu, the last stat they shared publicly, is they are north of 60%. I suspect that in the not too distant future you’ll see the majority of new HBO Max subs choose the ad-supported option. We tried to price it in a way where we’d be indifferent. We’re making a little more on the ad-supported version because of dollars we’ll generate from advertising.

That means Netflix will adopt ads.

I don’t think the ceiling is 222 million subscribers. I think the ceiling is far closer to 1 billion. You get there by giving customers the choice.

Lucas Shaw

Seems fairly obvious that people would opt for the lower price when given the choice – in fact Spotify used this model successfully for years to drive growth for both tiers. HBO Max doesn’t have different tiers here in Romania, but the price is much lower than Netflix and the migration from previous HBO Go subscribers came with a lifetime discount, so I don’t see much need for an ad-supported option. I would at least hope that advertising doesn’t interrupt the viewing, as it does with classic TV and on YouTube – YouTube’s ads have become increasingly aggressive and annoying. I think streaming companies could run ads between episodes or before and after the movie, as in cinemas, and still get enough return to justify the lower price.

Hypercritical: “An Unsolicited Streaming App Spec”

This is the one feature that may seem the least “basic”, but it really is essential. There’s so much good content available today that we need our apps to help us keep track of it all, not just what we’re currently watching. If state preservation and visual communication are the app’s short-term memory, then “My List” is the app’s long-term memory.

This is a pretty boring list, huh? A streaming app with only these features seems like it would be quite limited. But the sad fact is that few, if any, popular streaming apps reach even this extremely low bar. Let’s take a look at some examples.

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But none of this changes the overall picture, which is that even the most popular, well-funded streaming video apps fail to get the basics right in a shocking number of ways. Conflicting incentives surely explain some of these failings (e.g., promoting new content rather than letting me quickly resume what I was already watching), but an explanation doesn’t make these shortcomings any less bothersome.

John Siracusa

Interesting critique on the design of streaming apps. I agree with most of these bare-bones basics listed by the author – maybe except for his insistence on one-click access to subtitles; I always watch TV with subtitles on, so the only time when I need to access these controls is when I start a new series without Romanian subtitles, and I need to decide which other language to choose.

The Atlantic: “Absolute Power”

Even MBS’s critics concede that he has roused the country from an economic and social slumber. In 2016, he unveiled a plan, known as Vision 2030, to convert Saudi Arabia from—allow me to be blunt—one of the world’s weirdest countries into a place that could plausibly be called normal. It is now open to visitors and investment, and lets its citizens partake in ordinary acts of recreation and even certain vices. The crown prince has legalized cinemas and concerts, and invited notably raw hip-hop artists to perform. He has allowed women to drive and to dress as freely as they can in dens of sin like Dubai and Bahrain. He has curtailed the role of reactionary clergy and all but abolished the religious police. He has explored relations with Israel.

He has also created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history. Saudi Arabia has never been a free country. But even the most oppressive of MBS’s predecessors, his uncle King Faisal, never presided over an atmosphere like that of the present day, when it is widely believed that you place yourself in danger if you criticize the ruler or pay even a mild compliment to his enemies. MBS’s critics—not regicidal zealots or al‑Qaeda sympathizers, just ordinary people with independent thoughts about his reforms—have gone into exile. Some fear that if he keeps getting his way, the modernized Saudi Arabia will oppress in ways the old Saudi Arabia never imagined. Khalid al-Jabri, the exiled son of one of MBS’s most prominent critics, warned me that worse was yet to come: When he’s King Mohammed, Crown Prince MBS is going to be remembered as an angel.

Graeme Wood

Fascinating and comprehensive profile of Saudi Arabia’s future king who could shape politics in the Middle East – and beyond – for the coming decades, maybe even half a century. He strikes me as a dangerous mix of Vladimir Putin (MBS’ seven-years-long invasion of Yemen has caused numerous deaths and destruction – supported with weapons deliveries by the United States – and only now there are tentative signs of a cessation of hostilities), Xi Jinping (promoting economic prosperity for the masses while relentlessly cracking down on dissent and criticism) and Louis XIV (L’état, c’est moi!). As for his forced modernization of the country, we will have to wait and see if this becomes a permanent cultural shift, or if it will cause a violent backlash and sudden return towards conservative Islam – as it happened in Iran in 1979.

Bloomberg: “Elon Musk Bought Some Twitter”

Look this all makes complete sense, obvious, intuitive, simple sense. If you are the richest person in the world, and annoying, and you constantly play a computer game, and you get a lot of enjoyment and a sense of identity from that game and are maybe a little addicted, then at some point you might have some suggestions for improvements in the game. So you might leave comments and email the company that makes the game saying “hey you should try my ideas”. And the company might ignore you (or respond politely but not move fast enough for your liking). It might occur to you: “Look, I am the richest person in the world; how much could this game company possibly cost? I should just buy it and change the game however I want.” Even if your complaints are quite minor, why shouldn’t you get to play exactly the game you want? Even if you have no complaints, why not own the game you love, just to make sure it continues to be exactly what you want? The game is Twitter, the richest person in the world is Elon Musk, and:

Elon Musk has taken a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc. to become the platform’s biggest shareholder, a week after hinting he might shake up the social media industry.

Matt Levine

I read this news last week with a sense of dread, fully expecting Elon Musk to come in guns blazing and pressure Twitter to match his wild random ideas about how the platform should operate. The story quickly became crazier still, from Musk doing some sneaky stock market manipulation by delaying to file a form, to Twitter offering him a seat on the board in exchange for a limit on his stake in the company, to Musk announcing today that he will not be joining the board after all…

Foreign Affairs: “The Toll of Economic War”

To better grasp the choices to be made in the current economic sanctions against Russia, it is instructive to examine sanctions use in the 1930s, when democracies similarly attempted to use them to stop the aggression of large-sized autocratic economies such as Fascist Italy, imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany. The crucial backdrop to these efforts was the Great Depression, which had weakened economies and inflamed nationalism around the world. When Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in October 1935, the League of Nations implemented an international sanctions regime enforced by 52 countries. It was an impressive united response, similar to that on display in reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But the league sanctions came with real tradeoffs. Economic containment of Fascist Italy limited democracies’ ability to use sanctions against an aggressor who was more threatening still: Adolf Hitler. As a major engine of export demand for smaller European economies, Germany was too large an economy to be isolated without severe commercial loss to the whole of Europe. Amid the fragile recovery from the Depression, simultaneously placing sanctions on both Italy and Germany—then the fourth- and seventh-largest economies in the world—was too costly for most democracies. Hitler exploited this fear of overstretch and the international focus on Ethiopia by moving German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936, advancing further toward war. German officials were aware of their commercial power, which they used to maneuver central European and Balkan economies into their political orbit. The result was the creation of a continental, river-based bloc of vassal economies whose trade with Germany was harder for Western states to block with sanctions or a naval blockade.

Nicholas Mulder

Quite a disturbing historical analogy to the current geopolitical situation – today’s Russia as junior partner in relation to China mirroring the dynamic between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Ominously, the parallels can go further still: just as Nazi Germany was too large to contain back then, China has also grown into an economic force that would be impossible to sever from the world economy without inflicting serious and lasting damages. Americans are quick to berate Europeans, and Germany in particular, about their energy dependency on Russia, but the US economy basically runs on imports of consumer goods from China. It’s almost inconceivable that the US might someday impose strict sanctions on Chinese trade – public opinion was in a frenzy over a slight increase in gas prices, despite the US being largely energy independent; how would they react if the supply of their precious iPhones suddenly dried up?

IEEE Spectrum: “The New Supersonic Boom”

The companies working hard now to bring commercial supersonic flight back understand that they have to address sonic-boom noise, one way or another. And the farthest along, Boom Technology, is also taking pains to explain how its planes can be flown with fuels that won’t add to the enormous amounts of carbon that commercial aviation is already spewing into the air.

There are a couple of problems with that logic, says Dan Rutherford, who is aviation and shipping program director for the International Council on Clean Transportation. First of all, once the plane is out the door, there’s very little control that a manufacturer has over what fuel is used. What these aircraft manufacturers are contending is that their eventual customers are going to be willing to pay to prevent net carbon emissions. The planes themselves are not going to be fuel efficient, says Rutherford. He and two colleagues estimated in 2018 that a commercial supersonic airliner like the one Boom is designing would likely use five to seven times as much fuel per passenger-kilometer as a comparable subsonic aircraft.

Rutherford further notes that biomass-derived jet fuels are at least three or four times as expensive as conventional jet fuel and that synthetic jet fuel made from carbon extracted from the atmosphere will be more expensive still. Combine those higher fuel costs with the higher fuel consumption and you start to have such high operating costs for those planes that it is very difficult to see them succeed in the market, he says.

David Schneider

I have largely skipped past this piece of news last year, as it didn’t seem particularly relevant in the short term, nor particularly likely to materialize in the proposed timeframe. I then listened to a podcast with Kathy Savitt, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Boom Technology, and my biggest takeaway from that discussions was that they’re working on a new shiny toy for the hyper-rich!