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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
This Just In…CNN Eats the iPhone  launched mobile application blows away competing news apps. Time, USAToday, AP, WSJ, NPR, and all comers take note. Time Warner just raised the bar. The application offers strong competition to other news providers on the same platform and is one of the best demonstrations yet that a hybrid monetization model can work on the mobile platform. The $1.99 donwloadable program also includes prominant sponsorship.Apparently under development for months as CNN waited for Apple to deploy just the right combination of back end technical capabilities, CNN Mobile is by far the most robust and mobile-centric news app we have seen. The app combines text, images and video into a flow of multimedia news items that are formatted superbly for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform and give the user multiple points of access into news stories. The main screen offers up lateral navigation through ten topical news buckets (headlines, world, entertainment, etc.). Each news story has a prominent image as well as bullet points before scrolling into a full text version. The user can get the key points of the story at a glance and either drill further or swipe to the next story in the queue. When available, a video clip is a button push away. For video news fans, there is a separate section of streaming media assets, also parsed by topic and popularity. This is a deep dive into the CNN video trough and it will satisfy the most addicted newsaholics without overwhelming them with a cumbersome interface. The MyCNN section lets the user enter and save keywords that will filter news according to interests. The user can also tag the topic of any story she is reading so that it can be followed in the personalized section. Perhaps the most novel aspect of the CNN Mobile app is its occasional live streaming capability that the company can turn on only during breaking news and special news items. CNN leverages the alert system in the iPhone to notify the user of a breaking story and can open up a live stream from the CNN news telecast when needed. The sharing mechanism in the app is also flexible, letting a user push links to a story to SMS, email, Twitter and Facebook. The  user-generated component is here as well. CNN’s iReport feature lets users submit images and video and even participate in news programming by submitting questions for upcoming on-air interviews. CNN Mobile also gets many of the little things right that other news apps miss. The app restarts in the same spot you left it, so going outside of the app for a call, a link to a Web site or responding to an SMS does not force you to restart at a default screen. Likewise the ad banners in the app are well behaved. The app has an embedded browser so clicking on most ads we found (Chevron and Lexus are launch sponsors) kept us in the app rather than bouncing us out rudely to the iPhone’s Safari browser. Even the videos do not suffer from the usually lengthy CNN.com pre-roll ads. Instead a static ad image fills the screen as the video loads. This may change, but for now CNN gets it right. Some news users will find the depth and multimedia in CNN Mobile a bit overwhelming. The white text on black background is not as aesthetically pleasing as competing apps from Financial Times and New York Times. And orderly and more graphically pleasing apps such as USAToday’s remain attractive in their compactness. But CNN clearly has upped the game in bringing one of the leading multimedia news organizations to the mobile platform is a very robust and mobile aware way. At a one time charge of $1.99, the app is a bargain and it likely could succeed as an ongoing subscription. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com |
 Manager, Digital Media, NCC Media
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