Free TV For Everyone: CNN Gives It Away

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The CNN unit of Time Warner (TWX) has been charging $25 a year for viewers to watch video on its website CNN.com. But, not anymore. The video service is going "free".

The all-news channel says that its is changing its practice of charging subscribers because it want to sell advertising on the video feed instead. However, the new, free service will not carry ads yet.

CNN did not bother to mention the real reason that it changed its model. That is that its competitor MSNBC and a number of other video news sites give their web video programming away for free.

The move by CNN is another example of companies surrendering to the trend of free web video. To some extent the movement was fuel by YouTube where all video is free including some high profile programming from TV, music publishers, and cable channels.

It puts producers of high-cost programming like CNN in a bind. While it is hard to make money on free, it is also not clear that major TV advertisers will pay much to move their messages to programming online.

Mark it up to another reason that the major media companies with studio and TV businesses hate YouTube. It is creating viewing habits that undermine their ability to make money.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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