Gore launches new channel
2005-04-06 11:54
San Francisco - Al Gore has a plan for luring the internet generation back to television: make it more participatory by having viewers contribute their own video.
The former vice president and longtime internet champion joined investors on Monday to announce the creation of Current, a cable TV channel that will target younger viewers with a blend of news, culture and viewer-produced video.
Gore will serve as chairman of the board of the new venture, which will be based in San Francisco.
He and Joel Hyatt, the founder of Hyatt Legal Services who will serve as Current's chief executive, assembled an investment team that paid $70m last year to acquire the Newsworld International channel from Vivendi International.
The channel, to launch on August 1, will remain privately financed and initially will be available in 19 million cable-subscriber homes.
The channel will try to engage viewers ages 18 to 34 using the web's signature blend of interactivity and populism, Gore and Hyatt explained.
Gore, dressed in a charcoal grey suit and no tie, stood on stage with Current's creative team - a multicultural group of TV producers the same age as his children.
Giving young people a voice
He said the venture was dedicated to giving young people a voice.
"We're about empowering this generation ... to engage in the dialogue of democracy and tell the story of what's going on in their lives in the dominant media of our time," said the 57-year-old Gore.
Central to their strategy is inviting Current's viewers to supply their own video content and helping them produce it using editing tools that Current will make available on its website.
That video eventually will comprise more than half the programming seen on the channel.
The rest will be more traditional shows developed under the direction of David Neuman, Current's president of programming, whose resume includes stints at CNN and Walt Disney Television.
The channel also has established a partnership with the Google search engine, which will provide twice-an-hour updates on viewers' top internet searches.
Sergey Brin, the 31-year old co-founder of Google, praised the channel as an effective way to distribute video in a way that frees it from the limited bandwidth and other technological challenges that has kept it from being widely available on the web.
On the net:
www.current.tv
- AP