If Warner Bros. Discovery was spending hundreds of millions of dollars making programming for CNN+, Zaslav felt the company was misallocating resources. Wall Street tends to judge media companies on their main streaming product. Disney largely trades on Disney+ subscriber numbers. The Warner Bros. Discovery share price will likely move on the bundled number of HBO Max-Discovery+ customers.

CNN+ would be a sideshow niche product. Even if it showed growth, taking subscribers away from the larger bundle with the promise of a cheaper option in CNN+ would hurt Warner Bros. Discovery and represent a waste of resources.

One particularly irritating trait of CNN+’s pricing plan to Discovery executives was its “Deal of a Lifetime” plan — offering a 50% discount (initially $2.99 per month instead of $5.99) for as long a consumer remains a subscriber to CNN+. While that may be a great perk for a CNN+ subscriber, it was a strategic misfit for Zaslav. For anyone who would have signed up to the larger bundle because of CNN content, they now had a “forever” reason not to do so.