Launched on March 29, CNN+ is dead in just a month. This makes it the shortest-lived streaming service ever. Perhaps the April 28 shutting of the service is to ensure that it didn’t run over a month. Or else, many users who subscribed to the service on March 28 (the day subscriptions began) would have had their monthly subscription auto-renewed today. No CNN+ subscriber will be charged a second time now. The company could have checked on this before announcing the April 30 deadline. But when a service with so much hype and millions of dollars of investment from a company as renowned as Warner Bros dies within a month, it goes on to show the poor planning and thought process behind the project. No wonder they didn’t properly plan the end as well.
CNN+ subscribers will get a full refund
WarnerMedia, which owned CNN, recently merged with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery. The merger was completed just about a week after the launch of CNN+. An executive shake-up followed, and a couple of weeks later, CNN+ has been shelved too. It’s not like CNN+ was a great streaming service with high potential. It was quite doomed from the beginning. The company had reportedly invested anywhere between $100 million to $300 million on the service so far, with plans to invest $1 billion over the next few years. But three weeks after launch, when it announced the April 30 shut down, CNN+ had garnered just about 150,000 subscribers. So Warner Bros. Discovery might be shutting down the service for its own good. As for the 150,000-odd subscribers, Warner Bros. Discovery will refund the full $3 they paid for a month of subscription to the service. Priced at $5.99 per month, CNN+ was available at a 50 percent discount to early subscribers. Perhaps the service is dying even before that offer period ended. According to the company, all subscribers will get their refund within a month of CNN+ shutting down, i.e. before May 28. “CNN+ streaming will come to an end on April 28, 2022. If you purchased your subscription directly from us, we will be providing a full refund for your subscription fee back to your original CNN+ payment method by May 28, 2022,” the company said in an email to subscribers (via Digital Trends).
