Andrew Wallenstein has written an extremely interesting article on Current TV for The Hollywood Reporter that probably tells as much inconvenient truth about Al Gore's network as anyone left-leaning West coast publication can tell about a liberal icon such as Gore.
Wallenstein points out that after five years of existence, Current is not rated--that is, it doesn't pay to be rated, a sure sign that Current doesn't want to know the truth about itself. And in fact, The Cable Gamer has never met anyone who has ever watched Current. Bottom line: nobody is watching its hodgepodge of videos and whatnot. Trying to be nice, Wallenstein notes that Current is kinda like YouTube, which started about the same time in the Bay Area, but the difference, of course, is that with YouTube, the surfer gets to pick the show, whereas at Current, you just get whatever some programmer in San Francisco decides to put on. In other words, Current wasn't "You"Tube, in which you broadcast yourself, it was "San Francisco" Tube, in which you get what they want to show you.
The screengrab below displays a show that Current obviously thinks is particularly important:
That's pretty good fare for Middle America, huh? So it's no surprise that nobody is watching.
Wallenstein provides a thorough history of the channel, including this nugget:
When Gore gathered a team of investors to buy the network formerly known as NewsWorld International from Vivendi Universal Entertainment in 2004, rumor had it the former vice president sought to transform it into a liberal-minded corrective to Fox News Channel.
But Current didn't do that. Instead, they went with "San Francisco Tube."
So why does Current still exist at all? One reason: Gore. The Oscar, the Nobel Peace Prize: Everyone west of Highland Avenue and north of Sunset Boulevard loves him. Or if they don't love him, they at least adore him, and his Greeny message.
And that's what made, and makes, Current worth real money. Because it's in 70 million homes.
As Wallenstein puts it, ever so politely, Current's "valuation is tied up almost entirely in its distribution." Political and social pull gives Current that legacy advantage.
So nobody is watching Current, but its reach--greased by Green-tinged political correctness and overall leftcoast Democratic trendiness--makes it valuable, in the low hundreds of millions, long after people have grown tired of Gore and his pious hypocrisy. If people were watching Current, it would be worth five or ten times as much, but that's the challenge to a purchaser: How to jettison everything about Current, except its reach. Nobody in the cable biz has figured out how to do that--how to de-Gore the channel without publicly antagonizing The Goreacle.
And so Current stumbles along, as the most valuable cable channel that nobody watches.
