What Streaming's Biggest Flops Cost Subscribers Before They Vanished
CNN+, Quibi, T-Vision, PlayStation Vue and Redbox Instant all folded fast, here's what each one charged, and what the pattern means for your own subscription stack.
Five services, five fast exits
Streaming subscriptions come and go, but a handful of recent shutdowns stand out for how quickly they burned through money, both the company’s and, briefly, yours. A rundown from Cord Cutters News traces five high-profile failures: CNN+, T-Mobile’s T-Vision, Sony’s PlayStation Vue, Quibi, and Redbox Instant. None of them lasted more than a few years, and some didn’t make it past five weeks.
What each one actually charged
CNN+ launched in March 2022 at roughly $6 a month, about $72 a year if you’d committed annually, but couldn’t carry CNN’s actual cable feed due to existing distribution deals. It shut down within five weeks, before most subscribers got much use out of it.
T-Mobile’s T-Vision, launched in November 2020, started at about $10 a month for an entertainment-only tier and climbed to $40 a month for packages with local channels and sports. T-Mobile killed it after roughly five months, in April 2021, steering customers instead toward discounted YouTube TV and Philo subscriptions.
PlayStation Vue had the longest run of the group, from March 2015 to January 2020. It launched at competitive entry prices but, like most live-TV streaming bundles, got more expensive over time as content licensing costs rose, a pattern current Sling TV, YouTube TV and Fubo subscribers will recognize.
Quibi, backed by nearly $2 billion in funding, launched in April 2020 with short-form shows built for phones. It shut down after about six months with only around 500,000 subscribers, far short of projections.
Redbox Instant, a 2013 joint venture with Verizon, bundled limited streaming with kiosk rental credits for about $8 a month before folding.
Who actually took the financial hit
In most of these cases, the real losers were the investors and parent companies, not individual subscribers, monthly plans meant people weren’t locked into long contracts, and the dollar amounts at stake for any one household were modest: $6 to $40 a month, not a multi-year commitment. The bigger cost was time: signing up, learning a new app, and then having to find another home for the shows or sports you’d been watching.
The exception is anyone who prepaid annually or stacked a service into a bundle expecting it to stick around. When a service shuts down abruptly, as CNN+ did, promotional credits or partial-year prepayments don’t always get refunded in full, and the source material doesn’t detail what, if anything, any of these five offered departing subscribers.
What to do about it
Before subscribing to any new or newly rebranded streaming service, stick to month-to-month billing if it’s offered, even if an annual plan looks cheaper per month, the discount isn’t worth much if the service disappears in five weeks. Check whether a service can be canceled through your phone’s app store or carrier billing, since those routes are often faster than a company’s own cancellation page once it’s winding down. And if a service does shut down, look for a refund or credit announcement in your email and on the company’s site; absent one, dispute any remaining charge through your card issuer or carrier billing portal rather than assuming it will be handled automatically.