Introducing "CNN: News Junkie's Crack"

We are all aware of how much I love CNN. Therefore, you would expect that I would eargerly anticipate the release of their new VOD service "CNN Pipeline". But to be honest, I wasn't expecting much. As someone who works with online news and video all day, I know a lot firsthand about how much most of the streaming video services really, really suck. But every once in awhile, you find something that bucks the trend, and it appears that CNN Pipeline might be one of those.

First, my main complaint about the service - I have no idea how good or bad the stand-alone desktop app is, because I have yet to be able to get it to work. To begin with, it makes me nervous when any new piece of software requires a 15-minute download and reconfiguration from Microsoft. Too many fresh memories of the Sony debacle come to mind, and I really don't like not knowing what Microsoft and CNN might be sneaking onto my system to monitor my viewing (and other) habits. Moreover, it turns out that this app only works with WinXP Service Pack 2. I'm not cool enough to have upgraded beyond plain ol' WinXP. I would be interested in how many people are actually that upgraded on their home computers (of course, you shouldn't be using this so much at work.)

Thankfully, CNN did have the foresight to make a web-only version for the not-cool kids (and the Mac owners, since over 3 million Mac users isn't enough to make the desktop app multi-platform) that's plenty cool enough. You can see exactly what it looks like and all the things you can do at their website, but it basically consists of three continuous live feeds and a collection of packages that have run on CNN recently. The live feeds are mostly for the real news junkies, since they're basically whatever's showing on the CNN live feeds for stations at that moment. Unless you've got something really visually entertaining (like a good car chase) you're probably not going to get into watching press conferences or whatever President Bush is doing at the moment.

One of the channels also has its own anchor who does periodic updates that look a lot like CNN Headline News, and another channel often runs non-stop weather that looks a lot like the Weather Channel. But at night it's very cool, because they run CNN International live. Since Comcast has never added CNN:I to their digital package (unlike Charter) this is a treat. I slept to the sound of soothing foreign accents last night, until I was woken up early by live coverage of the Saddam trial (I have now established that Arabic is the most uncomprehensible language ever developed, and that this trial is like putting a narcissistic schizophrenic in court without a judge, because that's how Saddam is acting.)

The packages that you can select are pretty cool. It makes me wonder why they don't reair a lot of them more during the daytime on their channel, since it usually takes a lot for me not to see stuff on-air. If you're a Blackberry person, make sure that you check out Jeff Greenburg's package on the possible shutdown of the service. I do NOT recommend watching the story about the 1-hour facelift. I was unlucky enough to catch that on AC:360 last night, and it was bad enough to see once.

In any case, this service rates a "B" right now, and will probably be even more useful when there's some big breaking news going on (boy, I wish this had been around for Katrina, although I overdosed on only watching one channel for that.) Think about how great this will be for the next hurricane season. One live feed of Anderson Cooper, all the time! (You know I wasn't going to get through a whole CNN post without one mention of him, right?)

TAG: CNN Pipeline