‘Who Actually Thought CNN Plus Would Be A Good Idea?’ Dan Abrams and Colby Hall ROAST New Digital Service

Mediate founder Dan Abrams and Mediaite founding editor Colby Hall tore into CNN+, the new digital service whose launch has been plagued by low adoption rates and bad buzz.

Hall was Abrams’ guest on Thursday night’s edition of NewsNation’s Dan Abrams Live to discuss the fledgling service, which has struggled right out of the gate.

Abrams’ opening line sort of said it all about his critique: “Who actually thought that CNN Plus would be a good idea?”

The host then ticked through stats on the service’s dismal start and heavily-discounted subscription offerings, before introducing Hall. The pair mocked the premise of the service, while acknowledging the quality of programming like Chris Wallace’s new show:

MR. ABRAMS: Again, the idea that there’s this mass audience of like hardcore CNN fans and again, I really don’t mean this as an attack on any of the particular hosts, because it’s not about them. It’s about the way that they created this business. Unlike something like Fox Nation, right, where they’re really doing something pretty different, right. The idea there, you know, they’re airing Cops. They’ve got different kinds of programing, et cetera that appeals to a similar audience that would like Fox.

But it’s not really just like, ‘Oh, let’s hire a bunch of CNN-like anchors and have them do longer-form interviews’ or whatever the case may be. So it just blows my mind that someone thought that this was a good, you know, sort of business strategy. And look, and to give you credit, you’ve been saying this for a long time.

MR. HALL: Well, thank you for that. I mean, I think Chris Wallace has done made some news with a few of his interviews. And you know, things are going to change, I think. I don’t think CNN+ is going to go away. I think there’s going to be a lot of cuts simply because of redundancies. If you have like Discovery streaming, you know, you don’t need two sets of server farms, you don’t need two sets of studios. There are redundancies that will cut costs. I think their content offerings, my reporting suggests, is going to go way down.

And you know, they have a new president coming in, Chris Licht, who honestly has bigger fish to fry than figuring out CNN+. He needs to figure out what the nine p.m. host is going to look like and how they’re going to keep ratings flat once the Ukraine story starts to abate.

So, you know, I don’t think this story is over, and I don’t think that, you know, you know, cable news is going to be the way that it is forever. They just put a lot of money on the table on something that they don’t really know — They build a big mansion on a very sandy bank, and, you know, I think it’s going to evolve pretty quickly.

Abrams went on to inaccurately claim that no one would pay to see him in a leather jacket. There’s definitely some kind of audience for that.

Watch above via NewsNation.