CNN to invest $40M in its in-house startup Great Big Story over the next two years, turning it into 24-hour streaming service, distributed on Sling TV, others
Startup to shift from social distribution to 24-hour channel — Great Big Story said to be valued at as much as $250 million Tweets: @nzingaq , @mathewi , and @pkafka Tweets: Nzinga Qunta / @nzingaq : Wow. 24 hour streaming on 3 minute clips of interesting stories. http://twitter.com/... Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : I see these show up on Facebook all the time and they are actually really well done http://twitter.com/... Peter Kafka / @pkafka : Unless I missed something, Great Big Story's sole owner is CNN. Makes it hard to assign a real-world valuation. http://www.bloomberg.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Great Big Story was built as a social-distributed video studio, the kind of short-form producer Facebook was courting for licensing deals in late 2016. CNN's $40M commitment flips that model: instead of renting reach from social platforms, the startup becomes a 24-hour channel carried by distributors like Sling TV.
The move lands in a crowded lane for millennial-skewing streaming news — Cheddar launched months earlier and quickly added a $6.99/month premium tier on Vimeo. It also foreshadows CNN's broader streaming ambitions: WarnerMedia was later reported weighing a subscription service built on CNN content, which materialized as CNN+ and stalled within weeks of launch.
First-order effects
- Sling TV and similar distributors gain a turnkey 24-hour channel aimed at younger viewers without CNN having to build carriage from scratch; Great Big Story's output shifts from platform-dependent clips to scheduled linear programming.
- CNN is on the hook for $40M over two years against a said valuation of up to $250M — though, as Peter Kafka noted, sole ownership makes that figure hard to test against a real market.
Second-order effects
- Cheddar faces a well-funded rival chasing the same millennial news audience with a parent company's balance sheet behind it, pressuring its own funding and pricing path.
- Facebook and other social platforms lose leverage as producers like Great Big Story internalize distribution — content that once fed platform engagement now anchors a channel CNN controls.
Third-order effects
- The pattern — legacy networks spinning social-video studios into standalone streaming brands — runs straight through WarnerMedia's later CNN streaming plans and CNN+'s reported ~$300M spend for under 10K daily users, suggesting the constraint was never content supply but willingness-to-pay for a single-brand news channel.
- If distributor-carried niche channels prove cheaper than owned subscription services, expect more media companies to sell channels into aggregators rather than compete head-on with Netflix-scale services.
The trend: Legacy media is converting social-video studios into 24-hour streaming channels as a lower-risk on-ramp to direct-to-consumer distribution.