Two quick links for the morning re: the CNN Pipeline launch on Monday.

• Digg.com coverage of Pipeline’s launch. The comments are a great read.
• A liveblogging of Pipeline’s first day of programming.

Most of the discussion is dismissive of this as a pay product. Others try to balance the trolling with reasonable questions about the acceptance of users if the conent was interspersed with ads. A good discussion overall. I especially like the comments from Digg users pointing out that there is really no other source for day-in, day-out live streamed news on the web other than Pipeline. A few requests for BBC Pipeline, Digg.com Pipeline, and ESPN Pipeline. One user predicts CNNSi Pipeline for $5/month by the end of next year. Nice idea, but they’d have to resurrect my old network to do that ;-). Here’s a great comment from blueice03:

I beta-tested this and I was overwhelmingly impressed. Why? Because few other outlets, sites, news organizations or what have you, have done what CNN is attempting to do with this. All these comments about how absurd it is to pay for a service like this are, not to be a troll, the types of comments I’d expect from the slashdot crowd. I guess I don’t get it. Why is there this expectation that services offered over the internet should be cheap or free? If you want a premium service then you should expect to have to pay for that premium service and this, my friends, is a premium service. Hell, it is even cheap. It is just a little over $2 a month. And whoever complained earlier about having to download CNN’s own special player, you don’t have to. They do have a web version that is download free. It is a great looking service and the kind of offering I have always expected news outlets to have but don’t.

technorati tags: pipeline, cnn, broadband, digg

After several rounds of beta testing and a few leaks in the wild, CNN’s new Pipeline product has officially launched. Traditional media have covered this a bit (see this AJC.com story, free registration required), and the blogs have had a lot to say – almost all of it quite positive.

• MediaBistro covers the softlaunch on Sunday
  
• HDBeat gets all excited about the HD back-end to the new app
• Paidcontent.org mistakenly thinks the main feed is going out in HD, but has good commentary overall
• What’s Happening at CNN also chimes in on the Sunday launch
• Tadspot.com talks about Web 2.0 features he’d like to see in the product

Most interesting to me were the overwhelmingly positive comments on the LostRemote.com post. Users talk about the attractive price ($25/year or $0.99 daypass), access to CNN International in the off-hours, etc. Another commenter thinks out loud about the paid content model v. sponsorship, suggesting a sponsored model might make sense here; another applauds the lack of a playlist making decisions for the user about what to play next.

technorati tags: cnn, pipeline, broadband, paidcontent, hd

Ziff-Davis publication Publish (ah, how I loved that magazine back in the desktop publishing days of the early 90s) covers what they describe as the ‘beta of [CNN’s] new streaming news service, CNN Pipeline, to a select group of employees.’ They provide nine screenshots of the application, showing portions of an order path, the main feed, login, application live, on-demand, browse, mini and search modes. They also point out that there are two players, one web-based and another a PC desktop app. Gallery is here, story here.

Technorati Tags: cnn, pipeline, vod, news