The Vee Pee's New Tee Vee: Former Vice President Al Gore unveiled a new interactive cable TV channel for the internet generation Monday that blends the immediacy of video blogging with the voyeurism of reality TV.
Gore's TV network set to launch with Google tie-in: Former Vice President Al Gore and partners have renamed their upcoming youth-oriented TV network and set Aug. 1 as its launch date.
The venture, formerly called INdTV, will be called Current.tv, it was announced on Monday. The 24-hour network will target an 18- to 34-year-old audience and offer short-form content--15-second to five-minute segments--to be contributed by viewers.
Viewers will also be able to vote for their favorite videos and get tutorials via the Internet on how to produce their own segments
Gore's new media venture seeks to blend TV, Internet [T]he new San Francisco-based cable TV network he's heading promises to transform television by plugging it into the Internet.
One Question
Q: Al Gore's forthcoming Current television network will allow "citizen programmers," armed with video cameras, to both create and watch programming -- which sounds very blog-like. Did blogs influence the creation of Current?
A: Robin Sloan, Current's blogger: "The explosion of conversation and creation that blogs represent is absolutely a proof point for this model. Because of blogs, we know that people are capable of making incredibly cool, fresh, honest stuff, in huge quantity. Except with blogs it's mostly just text and images. So we want to provide the framework, resources, community and distribution to jumpstart that kind of massive creation and conversation with video."
