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The default view is latest news, where CNN's app surfaces plenty of helpful navigational elements.
Although it’s a bit late to the party, CNN hopes to make a big splash with its well-designed $2 iPhone app, which not only delivers the news in a variety of formats, but makes it easier for citizen journalists to file their own video news reports from the field.
Our exclusive, pre-release testing of CNN’s new iPhone app revealed it to be a solid, slick application that will be worth the one-time $2 fee for some news hounds, with no subscription payments to keep up with. While more expensive than the free mobile web version of CNN.com and other free alternatives, CNN’s app proves its worth by taking advantage of a wide range of the iPhone’s latest capabilities to offer features you can’t get elsewhere.
An innovative, across-and-down navigation system makes it easy to glance over a large number of stories, each summed up by an image and two bullet points of text. If something sparks your interest, you can delve further by tapping through to a video or text article. A live stream from CNN Live is also part of the deal, and you can share content from within the app using Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, or text message.
News flows not only down into the app but up from it. If a user spots something newsworthy, or which fits the description in one of CNN’s iReporter “Assignments,” they can record it on-the-go, edit it with the iPhone’s own video software (or shoot footage from within the CNN app itself), then upload it to CNN.com from the field — a far easier proposition with this app than without it.
As the news increasingly becomes a two-way affair, this approach positions CNN nicely as a go-to place not only for downloading but for uploading news. And an added emphasis on mobile reporting can only help increase the ratio of real, on-the-scene news footage to the wearisome opinion pieces occasionally shot by iReporters in their homes. But if CNN wants more high-end roving reporters to use on the service, it might consider linking it up with outside networks so that iReporters can upload breaking news videos once to CNN and syndicate from there.
A year ago, when current CNN.com senior vice president and general manager KC Estenson took the helm, it lacked a coherent mobile app strategy.
Clicking on the story brings up a photo and two bullet points summarizing the story. Scrolling down pulls up the full text of the story, while clicking the video link leads to the video player (screenshot below).
“I took a look around and said, ‘where’s the iPhone app?’” recalls Estenson. The site’s mobile strategy had been focused on developing a little web page for the mobile browser, then signing deals with service providers to promote their URL, rather the new mobile paradigm pioneered by Apple in which the consumer decides which mobile apps they want to run, and must be marketed to directly.
“We saw the model shifting away from ‘carriers as gatekeepers’ to direct-to-consumer, [and] if you’re in a direct-to-consumer business, your product actually has to be good,” he said. “We shouldn’t just rest on the fact that we’re CNN, we should make products are great. It turns out it took longer to develop something that was great than maybe I would like.”
Despite his late start and pressure to launch from elsewhere within Time Warner, Estenson delayed the app for months, until a full set of features could be added and tweaked — and for Apple to add HTTP video streaming so that CNN could use the same back-end it uses for web streaming with a light layer of transcoding. Apple added the open HTTP-streaming standard on June 17 with version 3.0 of its iPhone software. After that, it took CNN another three-plus months to put together the app in its current form.
Judging from our early testing, Esteson’s patience (and that of his team) paid off. CNN’s $2 iPhone and iPod Touch application, while facing free competition from the likes of the New York Times and many others, will win over its share of news junkies thanks to a well-designed selection of real-time breaking news and archived stories in short text, long text, video, and photo formats.
In addition paying $2 (no free version), users encounter advertisements from sponsors who can now buy slots across CNN’s television, web and app properties in a single stroke. Those are limited to line items in story lists, and still images that display as a video loads, with no video pre-roll ads to get in the way.
Flipping the phone sideways brings up a tiled interface; swiping a finger left or right across the screen scrolls between stories.
Of course, CNN’s app only includes content from CNN.com, but the site covers a lot of ground and has repeatedly managed to post breaking news while respecting users’ boundaries with its SMS news alerts. This app will pull those headlines in real time and will include similar, configurable breaking news alerts so that you’re never the last to know about a big event.
When a hurricane strikes in the area, everyone wants to know. For the more specific news that will interest you but possibly not others. the app also lets you specify keywords to follow, which isn’t possible on CNN.com, and automatically saves stories of interest in a special section for offline reading.
All stories related to your keywords appear in the MyCNN section and are stored in the iPhone’s memory cache, as do local news stories (including ones from competing publications, which are left out of the main headline area). You can also tag stories one-by-one for offline reading. These offline features are crucial, and iPhone developers too often overlook the offline/underconnected scenario, so it’s nice to see them included here.
Overall, CNN’s iPhone and iPod Touch offering ties together a decent breadth of timely news in text, video, and photo-plus-summary formats, through an interface that has lots of navigation and viewing options that don’t add any unintuitive clutter.
The video portion of the app requires lots of wireless bandwidth, which can get expensive for carriers (and users without unlimited data plans), in addition to degrading wireless data service in general (the more people stream to iPhones, the harder it is to stream to iPhones). To that end, Estenson told us that Apple presented CNN.com with bandwidth guidelines for its videos.
“Serving a super-high-quality, high-def-like stream would be problematic,” explained Estenson. “We were given guidelines by AT&T and Apple, and we’ve lived within those,” because high-def could adversely affect AT&T’s wireless networks. Estenson hopes those limits improve over time, but for now, the app’s video player adjusts its variable bit rate based on a phone’s connection speed.
CNN’s iPhone app does a great job of presenting its content through the iPhone/iPod Touch interface, and the crowdsourcing feature for on-location news reporting is cause for celebration. As for the app’s video quality, that’s harder to convey in text but we’ll try: The videos in CNN’s app look crystal clear on Wi-Fi. On 3G and Edge, Larry King looked a little better.
Here’s a gallery of screenshots from our exclusive testing before the app launched (iTunes link) Tuesday morning:
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Source: Eliot Van Buskirk
