For a few months, I was a paying user of CNN Pipeline, the subscription service for online video streams for CNN.

Quite frankly, I was never too happy about paying for what I considered was a waste of bandwidth: 4 streams that you could choose from that were typically 3 feeds without audio (e.g. images from a press conference before it started) and a 4th feed that was an annoyingly upbeat recap of random popular news of the celebrity/health alert variety… something I could have watched just as well by turning on any TV set on any channel these days.

Even for paying customers, Pipeline did not give access to the streaming international news content but was more like an extended “Paris Hilton” interview channel.

Why CNN did not offer live streams of CNN International as a dedicated stream on the platform truly baffled me.

In the end, few people were willing to pay for the service, so it did not come as a surprise that CNN decided to scrap Pipeline and move to an ad-based model.
CNN just launched a new website redesign this weekend and it truly looks much cleaner, with more white space and a clearer layout on video and breaking news. Good job there!

Even the full-page video player is gorgeous to look at and it appears to finally have dedicated live video streams in the US and International site. Finally !!