Al Gore’s Current TV;Viewer Created Content, soon to conquer Italy

Al Gore’s great media venture, Current TV, which started out in the US in 2005, is now ready to set foot in Italy in just a few days time. What’s so great about Al Gore’s enterprise is that it employs a method where young, internet active individuals have the opportunity to interact with the two most popular means of communication, simultaneously, these being TV and the Internet.

Web/TV Congruity

Current TV allows its audience to participate and interact with television by giving them the ultimate tool for becoming a part of what is being aired. What’s the tool? This dynamic generation of savvy internet users can create their own feature videos and submit them to current.com. Its open dialogue for everyone, whether its music, politics, hobbies, current affairs, or a spur-of-the-moment thought, its all taken in by current.com. Once online the submissions undergo a voting process where the rest of the online community can then participate in by choosing their favorite. Sort of like a Digg/Sphinn voting concept. But going backwards a little bit, the decision is not completely entitled to just the online audience, there is also an online staff which monitors the featured videos, who have the final say for what goes on air.

The overall idea for the channel, as well as the site, is to serve as a spokesperson for all the people who wish to make a statement or share their ideas with the outside world. See Italy’s presentation on Current TV.

“We have no intention of creating a Democratic channel, a liberal channel, a TV version of Air America,” Gore said. “That’s not what we’re about. We’re about empowering this generation of young people in their 20s to engage in a dialogue of democracy and to tell the stories about what’s going on in their lives using the dominant medium of our time.”

Google Current

This gets even more interesting when it comes to Current TV’s segment which airs what Google searchers are ‘searching for’ at that moment. This they call Google Current. In other words, if your company, personal website, product or video, is famous online, there’s a high probability you’ll get on TV. You think this will have an effect on SEM at all? Oh yes, and a big one. Personally, this will give the word keyword a whole new meaning.

The Alternative

Of course television may be too expensive for some advertisers, but following the aforementioned statement, one of the good things about Current TV is that if you do well online, meaning you have a good conversion rate=clicks=search impressions, you’re most likely to be on TV sooner or later. For all advertisers, this is a good, integrated multichannel approach that can give you an overall scope on your campaign’s performance.

Current TV Italy

I really think this idea about introducing Al Gore’s Current TV in Italy will awaken advertisers, people and corporations to invest and dedicate a percentage of their budget on online advertising. In the end, it all boils down to a TV/Web format, made up of user created content (like YouTube, which we know everyone loves), that will reach a infinitely wider audience and hopefully make a change in the future of TV. Its all about giving the ‘common people;’ the audience, a say, an opportunity to express themselves in a completely viable way, to share, transmit and diffuse their ideas and points of view to the world.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 11:39 am and is filed under Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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