The problem is CNN’s product is news. And almost all news is covered by multiple outlets, meaning you can get more or less the same thing from other video news services, for free. The annual State of the Union Address is the same, no matter which channel you watch. The footage from Ukraine is horrific whether you’re watching CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC. Maybe one network or another does a better, more thorough, or more viewer-enticing job of covering a particular story. But is the difference big enough that people are willing to pay for it?

To get people to shell out money for a streaming service that was primarily offering news, that streaming service would have to offer something really appealing that was dramatically different from everything else, and that couldn’t be watched any other way. Maybe a host like Tucker Carlson, with his 3 million viewers or so, could get a portion of his audience to shell out for a subscription. But you wouldn’t want to rely on just Carlson; a streaming news service would need a much bigger audience to be financially feasible, so it would have to assemble a bunch of the most popular figures in the news world, and then make it impossible to see them anywhere else. And even that would be a gamble. Ideally, a news-focused streaming network would build a subscriber base of the Tucker Carlson superfans and The Five superfans and the Rachel Maddow superfans and the superfans of some CNN’s most popular hosts and anchors – and figure out some way to develop its own stars.