1y ago

Max wants to push alerts on viewers when there is breaking news on CNN.

variety.com Live-Streamed CNN Channel With New Shows Set to Debut on Max

You might call it CNN Headline News — for the streaming era. Warner Bros. Discovery plans to unveil a 24/7 live-streamed news service called “CNN Max” on September 27, and indicat…

CNN Max is likely to evolve over time. Among the features the company will try out are ways of alerting Max viewers to breaking news while they are watching something else on the service, whether it be an HBO series, a Turner Classic Movies selection or an old episode of Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”

The enshittification of our world continues unabated.

66 comments

Great, a CNN "Breaking News" update interrupting your movie or show every time Trump pinches off a fresh new loaf on Pravda Social; just what everyone wants!
- I have the cbs news app on my phone. Yesterday I got a breaking news push notification informing me that someone caught a big alligator. I can't imagine the rage I'd be filled with if I was immersed in a show only to be interrupted by a pop up like that.
  Or to use the recent hurricane coverage as an example:
  Breaking: Hurricane Project To Hit Florida
  Breaking: Hurricane Projected to be 'Major Hurricane '
  Breaking: Hurricane Strengthens to Category 3 Ahead of Landfall in Florida
  Breaking: Hurricane Strengths to Category 4 Ahead of Landfall in Florida
  Breaking: Hurricane Makes Landfall in Florida
  Breaking: Hurricane Downgraded to Category 2 Hours After Landfall in Florida
  Breaking: Small City Faces Sever Flooding from Hurricane
  Breaking: Hurricane Crosses into Georgia
  Etc. Pop up, pop up, pop up, pop up. Id either stop watching Max or have to ask my doc to prescribe blood pressure meds.
  
  I agree. I can understand interrupting the show for somethings. Earthquake early warning, fine. A celebrity going to rehab, not ok.
  
  But anyways, how's the weather been in Florida and Georgia lately? All good, I presume?
- Yeah it's just gonna be "breaking news" that turns out to just be fear mongering. Kinda like how pretty much all major news sources have been for the last 20(?) years.
  Hard pass.

Both are now owned by Trump defender David Zaslav, the same guy who decided to rename HBO Max to Max. He has a history of reworking networks. https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/david-zaslav-cnn-chris-licht-warner-discovery-1235634424/
Add HBO and CNN to the enshittification list.
- Yep. Zaslav is a real piece of shit. He was also behind cancelling Batgirl and Scoob before they were released and taking a bunch of animated shows off of Max but not making them available anywhere else.
  
  I feel like we need a shakeup to copyright law. If you copyright something and place it for sale, you can't just remove it from sale. And if you do, like in the Zaslav-enshittification, it becomes public domain. Once you create and share something with the world, it isn't really yours anymore. Sure we should enable creators to monetize that for a reasonable amount of time (20yr or so, or 10yr after death) but deliberately removing creation from being able to legally be seen again is bullshit. If you wanted to keep your shit secret, it shouldn't have been copyrighted and published. /rant
- CNN has been shit for well over a decade now.

CNN is not relevant to me or my generation. It is a rage bait channel for boomers. Nothing productive is ever discussed on there. It is a giant circle jerk about Trump’s latest outrage. They beat every topic to absolute death. I’m sorry, I have other things to do besides watch a bunch of mannequins find ways to fill 12 hours of air time from a 2 minute news clip.
If you start interrupting my escape from the daily news cycle with useless breaking news alerts, not only will I kill you, I’ll also cancel my subscription to Max.
- Yeah, this is just a ridiculous idea that only a geriatric boomer could come up with. If there was breaking news we cared about, we'd get a notification on our phone. Unless we intentionally put our phone on silent because we wanted to enjoy something without interruption.
  They're really going to push everyone to running their own home servers to watch pirated content again. For a few years they had a product where for a like $10/mo we could just watch whatever without ads, and it was legitimately better than piracy. They're just hell bent on ruining that.
- i wish they had a plan that only had hbo content, most of the time the other stuff just gets in the way and is annoying to scroll past. maybe they could call it “hbo max”

HBO used to be my favorite streaming service, I loved it. Now it's full of reality tv crap. RIP.
- That's why they preemptively dropped "HBO" from the old "HBO Max" moniker.
  
  Get HBO classic for an additional $14.99!
- Among all the other bullshit they pulled, the CEO bragged upon purchase of choking the service with cheap to produce reality show crap.
  I had HBO in some form for decades, since I was a kid. They were the best and among the last prestige content creators. I dropped HBOs corpse last year over it. Fuck this late stage capitalism race to the bottom.
  Also, if somehow all the shit they pulled upon acquisition wasn't enough to stop paying them 160 annually a year ago, this would have been.
  
  I want general grants to be given to small time production teams, even if some of the teams are teenagers. I always think of all the great stories we are missing, just because people were skipped over.
  A good story can hold its own weight and doesn't need a huge FX budget or popular actors.
- I've had multiple issues with very recently released movies (like Crazy Rich Asians) not playing at all and only giving me pixelated nonsense or the aspect ratios being completely fucked up. Never happened on HBO Max. Only since the forced migration to the new app

My nothing-a-month-plan looks better every day.

Max wants to push alerts on viewers when there is breaking news on CNN.
I could maybe see there being a market for this if the default is not to show them, and there's an option to receive notification of developments on a specific topic. It's better than rabidly refreshing a particular topic that you are specially interested in.
Like, say you live in an area with an approaching hurricane, and you wanted to be alerted if there are any new developments on that particular topic.
However, I have a hard time believing that, in the general case, people want alerts popping up.
- The issue is that I can't tell CNN how severe of a breaking news story I want it to be to interrupt what I'm watching. To me, a story worthy of interrupting my show would be like the death of the president or nuclear armageddon or something. But to CNN, breaking news is like so and so celebrity said "Trump bad".
  
  Yep, not only is the idea super annoying, the thing that news networks think should be breaking news is completely out of step with what people actually want to know about.
  It's always stuff like 'old celebrity died!', 'Trump did/said something idiotic!', 'we still haven't found MH370!', 'some bullshit about the UK royal family!'.

Unfortunately something like “Biden’s college ex-roomate’s best friend’s cousin was caught on camera saying a bad word!” constitutes “Breaking News” for CNN.

As a reminder, CNN betrayed Americans way back in the early 1990s by selling the first Bush War, and hasn't gotten better since.
- Was there mainstream media that didn't try to sell the war? You had to go to stuff like Democracy Now to hear any kind of critical voices.

Piracychads keep winning
- Never stopped
  
  It's honestly gotten so good now and lead me to learn so much more about storage hardware and home servers
- True, but not as helpful for the Turner Classic Movies side of the business. A lot of old films are not available via piracy sites because there isn't much interest in them outside of a niche film buff market. I haven't looked, but I'm guessing I'm not going to see too many Dead End Kids or Boston Blackie movies on a torrent site, but I might on TCM. And now they're going to interrupt that with bullshit.
  
  Just did a quick search and there seems to be some material from both in archive.org, even youtube and theres some DEK movies in yts too. In case you are interested.
  
  It depends on how deep you wish to go down the hole.
  For me, and especially now that Netflix is ending their DVD service, if I can’t find something old via torrent, I’ll find it on DVD on Amazon, used for as cheap as possible. Then, rip it, and sell it back on Amazon used. Odds are, whoever is buying it from me is doing the same thing I just did.

If I get a notification that interrupts what I am watching on HBO Max I will never use it again

My question is, what exactly do they consider 'breaking news'? These days every news story starts off with 'breaking news'. If they want to interrupt me so bad, I'll find whatever I want to watch elsewhere.

Motherfuckers, I don’t even watch CNN. What the fuck is going on today? Sony raising PS plus prices to ridiculous levels and now this. Fuck CNN. Fuck MAX!
- "raising PS plus prices to ridiculous levels" Just change to a different company's service, .... Oh, wait.
- What the fuck is going on today?
  Interest rates. Loans just got a lot more expensive so big companies are all scrambling to shake down their customers for every penny they can get so they can get more debt off their books.
- I just looked up PS Plus prices. Wth. Why does everything have to go up in price? The same service costs $20 more? I used to always get the codes on sale and now that’s harder to get so I was already thinking twice about renewing. Now with the price increase, I might as well just not renew it.
- I hadn’t seen the PS+ increase before this and just now looked it up.
  Like…seriously?? $80 for the base tier? And $160 for the top one?
  There’s nothing extra being provided. The only reason I’ve bothered to keep it is for the 2 games each month since I don’t really online play that much anymore.
- Easiest answer is to be your own consumer
  
  Every time I make a decision the company ruins it.

RSS feeds exist already.

glad I cancelled max, seems like they're mostly a tax shelter at this point

Well, I sure as shit won't be subscribing.

The minute I see anything pop up while watching my Bar Rescue I will be cancelling my subscription

This bullshit is going to interrupt me during my 14th rewatch of Entourage?

Something that perhaps I missed in the article is if CNN Max will be a new app or will the use the existing Max app? If it’s the latter then I hope we can disable it.
- It's the latter.

66 comments