That’s right. CNN is giving up on their fee-based CNN Pipeline service beginning next week. Pipeline offered both live video streams as well as a searchable database of archived content.

This blog post from CNN offers a few details:
1) Will not be commercial free (Pipeline was)
2) The Pipeline viewer will disappear
3) Live content will be a part of the new service. How much? At what times? We don’t know.

Why eliminate the service?

From the blog post:

First, as popular as the service was, it became clear to us that reaching true scale was going to be impossible if the product remained a pay service. Remember that our entire mission is about getting more news to more people on more platforms… and too few people actually subscribed for us to meet that goal…Second, once we built our new flash video experience in the Integrated Story presentation on CNN.com, we realized that that was a better experience than even the Pipeline player for videos.

Does this CNN experience, once again, that charging for content on the web is a major challenge?

We do hope that in some form the massive archive of content that Pipeline provided will continue to be available.

Source: CNN.com Blog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 and is filed under Multimedia Search, Web 2.0, Webcasts and Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.