Freeing the Pipeline: CNN's online vid service to stream for free
CNN launched its subscription service, Pipeline, in 2005 in part following the WSJ.com model and in part banking on the idea that if content is good enough, we'll be happy to pay a premium (in this case, $25 per year) to get it.
There's no official word on the success of Pipeline since its launch, and no metrics have been released showing what percentage of CNN.com's 6 million daily users are paid subscribers. But starting July 1, the streaming video service will be free.
I'm going to take a slightly contrarian view here, and you may totally disagree with me...but here goes.
I don't think content -- information -- should be completely free. Our society has propegated the ideology that stuff we have access to online ought to come without a pricetag. And while I'm certainly tired of plunking down thousands of dollars for software applications originally intended for large corporations, I don't think its asking too much for consumers to pay for news reported by trained journalists.
Things happened so quickly: Access to the Internet became widespread. Napster and Limewire made it easy to share copyrighted material. News orgs put their content online using a budget model built around advertising rather than subscriptions. Then many of us stopped even visiting individual sites, instead using ad-free RSS feeds to get our information. Wikipedia happened. Citizens began publishing more and more "news" to their own sites or to community sites.
Now our news is free - but it's not all quality reporting. Worse, there is growing assumption that anything worth seeing online will come without restriction or even registration.
There's no question that in the near future there will be more information available, not less. And I'd argued that the role of a professional journalist will eventually be one based in aggregating rather than basic day-to-day local reporting.
Yes, digg and other similar sites rely on the wisdom of crowds to help us suss out what content is earnest and which is baloney. But the crowds can sometime be hacked. And what if the average digg user doesn't reflect my tastes?
If there was a website dedicated to reporting news, providing me with comprehensive background information a la BBC News, offered quality video and audio services and searchable, sharable databases - all without banner ads or other embedded paid links - I might just be willing to pay a premium. One of the best working models for this online is WSJ.com - the subscription section of the site is flourishing and provides a fantastic user experience.
It's too bad CNN couldn't figure out an innovative way to make Pipeline relevant to users. The answer didn't have to mean caving in to our perception of what the market will bear.
