Against The Wind, Current Sails Forth
August 3, 2005
Al Gore's network targeting America's young
There are two ways to look at Al Gore’s new network, Current, which launched yesterday.
One is that it’s a dumb idea, and a lot of people think it is. Why launch a news channel targeting the very people, adults 18-34, who are so little inclined to watch the news?
But there’s another way to look at it. If Gore is right and Current catches on, it stands to be hugely successful as a network of a new mold, unlike any now airing, melding as it does the internet and television for a generation at ease with both.
While people may ridicule Current, they also ridiculed MTV more than two decades ago, a network that launched on a not dissimilar premise of appealing to young viewers on their own terms.
After one day, it's already getting a range of reviews. Not many were out-and-out positive.
Writes The Washington Post’s Chip Crews, “It's unfair to draw conclusions based on a single day's offerings, but yesterday Current TV played a little like ‘Today’ or ‘Good Morning America’ on a slow news day. (Of course the people were younger and the hip-hip quotient much higher.) Blandly uplifting segments – ‘pods,’ in Current parlance -- on sex and dating in Iran, bridge-and-canyon skydivers and a pompous toad of a graphic artist glided harmlessly by, neither giving offense nor commanding full attention.”
Red Herring was already predicting some changes: "While Current may not remain in its current format for long, the channel will be an interesting one to watch develop, both on TV and the web, even as Mr. Gore and his political career have undergone several evolutions of their own."
Current is available to about 20 million households through DirecTV and some Time Warner and Comcast cable systems.
Viewers can voice their views about potential segments on www.current.tv, and the most popular segments will be shown most frequently on the air. To fit with current lingo, these segments are called pods.
Most of the pods will run from 15 seconds to five minutes, which should fit well with Generation Y’s short attention span. Topics include entertainment, parenting, careers and global events.
The channel runs stories about whatever is the most popular search topic on Google, every half hour.
Current arose out of the ruins of the old Newsworld International, inheriting several of that channel’s distribution deals.
Gore and attorney Joel Hyatt, the man behind Hyatt Legal Services commercials, bought Newsworld International, a 24-hour cable channel, in 2004 for $70 million and turned it into Current. They put in some of their own money along with about 20 other investors, including Robert Pittman, who created MTV’s programming and was CEO of America Online, and Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks.
David Neuman, 44, a former executive at NBC, Channel One, Disney and CNN, is the programming chief. He, Gore, 57, and Hyatt, 55, run the venture. Most of the network’s 120-plus staffers are under 40.
Being famous or good-looking doesn’t hurt if you want to work there. The crew of on-air reporters and producers includes former Miss USA Shauntay Hinton, who studied broadcast journalism at Howard University; Deepak Chopra’s son Gotham, president of development for the largest comic book studio in India; and Johnny Bell, a surfer with a degree from UCLA who has no TV experience but worked on a banana farm in Central America.
In keeping with the internet’s spirit, yesterday's launch of Current was delayed five minutes due to a router failure. And users experienced significant delays in loading the web site’s home page Monday, apparently because it was inundated with traffic, according to site performance tracker Keynote systems.
The channel's early segments included a "Current Caring" feature “Don’t Step on MY J’s,” which focused on a Virginia collector of Air Jordan sneakers who spends every cent of his income on them. "Current Caring" profiled a human rights activist for a Books Not Bars program who’s trying to reform the system for juvenile offenders. And "Current Hottie" followed Fatma D’Abo, a Gambian model for Joe’s Jeans, as she walked along the Sunset Strip.
Source: Media Life
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/News2005/aug05/aug1/2_tues/news3tuesday.html