Sunday, April 6th, 2008...12:31 am - Peter Giles
Current TV on Australasian tour
Current TV’s Ezra Coopenstein is currently touring Australasia as a guest of the Portable Film Festival. Ezra is one of the founding members of the Current TV team and works as their VP of Viewer Created Content or VC2. Empowering viewers is at the heart of the Current philosophy and VC2 makes up about one third of their on air content and the entirety of their web portal. Current TV is a clever amalgamation of cable television and web community. The first filter on viewer created content is the viewers themselves and the process of viewing, commenting on and assessing content is also a means of constituting a creative community. Current has been very successful in bringing younger viewers back to television because gives them an opportunity to express themselves and communicate. The TV offering has recently been extended to the UK and Ireland and in May will open its doors in Italy. Who knows, tomorrow it may be as ubiquitous as CNN or the The Discovery Channel. It certainly offers cable networks a model to upgrade their cross platform capabilities as Current offers an effective format to drive viewers/creators from web to TV
The initial vision of Current revolved around creating an independent news network to counter the top-down media networks. It has managed to create a service that is suited to the times, both politically, and in a media landscape beset with challenges. It’s heartening to see an activist community of citizen journalists emerging and Current TV seems quite comfortable fostering them and letting them express their voice.
In the coming week Ezra will be appearing in a range of cities throughout Australasia and more information about his symposium talks can be found here.
Leave a Reply