A recent report surfaced suggesting that CNN would be making cuts to the budget for their streaming service platform CNN+. As a result, it didn’t take long for the network to begin haking at the spending and firing someone on the financial side.
According to Axios, Neil Chugani, Discovery’s current CFO for streaming and international, has replaced CNN CFO Brad Ferrer as part of what the report terms “a broader finance team restructuring.”
This move is one of the first since the merger between Discovery-WarnerMedia became official.
“Inside CNN, executives think the launch has been successful. Discovery executives disagree,” Axios’ media reporter Sara Fischer wrote. She also cited that “CNN+ has roughly 150,000 subscribers so far.”
Furthermore, Fischer writes that despite the streaming service now available on Roku to bump its subscription numbers, “with marketing around the service suspended, there are concerns that growth will be short-lived.”
The Axios reporter shared her opinion on the entire issue with budget cuts coming to the marketing side, blaming “bad timing, limited communications and misaligned incentives for how CNN and Discovery got strategically misaligned on such a massive product rollout.”
Eduardo Razo is the Assistant Content Editor for BNM, which includes writing daily news stories on the news media industry. He can be found on Twitter @eddierazo_ or you can reach him by email at eddie1991razo@gmail.com.
