Current TV

» see current.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

current tv was american-only at the cable-bundle layer. there was no satellite feed in turkey and no international distribution deal of any kind. no streaming arm either that i could have subscribed to from istanbul or ankara. the channel was carried by comcast in the united states starting august 1, 2005, plus direct tv and dish on similar bundle terms, and that was the entire footprint. by the time it had any name recognition outside the united states i had to look it up to even confirm where it ran.

al gore and joel hyatt founded indtv holdings in 2004 with backing from supermarket billionaire ronald burkle and a vague mission to build a youth-oriented cable channel that would treat the audience as participants rather than viewers. when the channel launched on august 1, 2005, the format was unusual: short user-submitted video segments called pods that would air between presenter blocks, with viewer-vote-style mechanics deciding which pods made it on air. it was structurally something close to youtube on tv, ten months before youtube was acquired by google. the channel ran this format for about five years.

the original pod model never produced the breakout audience the founders had projected. by 2011 current tv had pivoted away from user-submitted content toward a more conventional cable-news format aimed at left-of-center american politics. that june the channel hired keith olbermann away from msnbc and put him in the eight-pm slot with a five-year, fifty-million-dollar contract. the olbermann hire was the brief peak of the channel's american cultural footprint. by march 2012 olbermann had been fired in a public dispute over editorial control and production resources. the channel filed suit. olbermann filed a counter-suit. the eight-pm slot moved to eliot spitzer's show, which never reached the same viewership.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

current tv's actual operating reality was always the cable carriage deal more than the editorial content. comcast carried it in roughly forty million homes from 2005 onward as part of a 2005 launch agreement. direct tv and dish carried it on similar terms. that gave the channel an audience surface that was technically large but was almost entirely passive: people scrolled past channel 107 or channel 196 on the way to somewhere else. the average prime-time audience hovered between thirty thousand and fifty thousand viewers in most measurement periods after 2008. the keith olbermann show briefly pushed prime-time to around a hundred and seventy thousand viewers in june 2011 before settling back.

the staff side was real. current tv won a peabody for a 2007 documentary segment on the cambodian sex trade, and a 2009 north korea reporting incident where two american journalists working for current were detained for several months in pyongyang briefly made the channel the center of an actual diplomatic story. those moments were genuine. they were not, however, what advertisers paid for, and they did not move the prime-time numbers.

~ the day it died ~

on january 2, 2013, al gore and joel hyatt announced they had agreed to sell current tv to al jazeera media network for an undisclosed price reported by both forbes and the new york times at roughly five hundred million dollars. the deal closed in mid-january. al gore reportedly received about a hundred million dollars personally from the transaction, which produced a side-controversy when the new york post pointed out that gore had been a vocal climate-policy advocate and qatar's economy ran on natural gas. gore's response was that the buyer's news operation was editorially serious and that the political-advocacy criticism missed the structural point.

the channel itself was scheduled to be shut down once al jazeera built out its replacement. that happened on august 20, 2013 at three pm eastern time. current tv aired its final segment at two fifty-eight pm and went off the air at exactly three pm with no on-screen acknowledgment. al jazeera america took over the channel slot a minute later. existing carriage agreements transferred but not all cable providers honored them. time warner cable dropped the channel within hours of the transition citing contractual grounds, taking about eleven million homes out of the new operation's reach on day one.

~ the inheritance ~

al jazeera america ran for thirty-two months. it launched august 20, 2013 with seven hundred and twenty employees and an editorial mandate to do serious longform american news without the cable-news-shouting-match conventions. the journalism was widely praised by media critics and almost entirely ignored by the actual cable-news audience. by january 13, 2016 al jazeera media network announced it was shutting al jazeera america down. qatar's broader budget cuts in the lower-oil-price 2015 environment made the american venture impossible to sustain. the channel went dark on april 12, 2016. final headcount was around seven hundred.

what got buried in the two-step shutdown was the entire eleven-year arc of al gore and joel hyatt trying to build a serious-news cable channel in the united states. current tv had the cable carriage plus a peabody, with the north korea hostage incident on its record besides. al jazeera america had longform reporting that was respected within the industry. neither had the prime-time audience that american cable news required to pay its own bills. the slot that current tv occupied on the cable lineup is now mostly empty space or rebranded to other networks that have themselves since failed.

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