Currently in trouble….
OK
Before I start, full disclosure.
I am a shareholder in Current TV
Which makes me hope that new CEO Mark Rosenthal’s strategy for success will work.
But I am not so sure.
The intitial idea behind Current was to tap into the massive ‘democratization of video’.
This is not wrong.
More than 24 hours of content are uploaded to Youtube every minute.
That’s just an astonishing number, and it shows that the desire to create content is there.
Current’s mistake (IMHO), was to simply take those pieces and string them together and call it programming.
It isn’t.
It isn’t compelling and it isn’t watchable.
What Current tapped into was a vast and almost limitless pool of potential.
Potential talent.
But that potential has to be trained and it has to be directed.
It has to be taught what to do.
We are the day after Gutenberg invented the printing press.
Just handing out pencils to the peasants in Germany and telling them to write, or publishing their first scribblings is not enough.
What Current should have done (my idea, dismissed out of hand by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt) was to take the best 200 filmmakers who had come to us and create a kind of Video Peace Corps. Sign them up for two years and then put them to work creating great programming.
That programming could be documentaries, or it could be reality shows or scripted dramas or whatever else they wanted to make.
That’s the idea behind unleashing a creative force.
Let them make what they wanted to make – because it would also be what they wanted to watch.
Instead, Current just posted short video after short video after short video. Like watching Youtube hour after hour.
A snore… or the kind of programming only a schizophrenic could love.
Now CEO Mark Rosenthal hopes to ‘double down’ on the ‘documentaries’.
OK.
Like I said, as a shareholder, I hope it works.
But I think that Mark is missing the USP for Current; missing a unique opportunity to really tap into the creative wellspring that the democratization of the medium has unleashed.
This is too bad.
But what can you do?
I have written to Mark, but so far, no responses.
They did, at least, send me my K2, so I know they’re getting my emails.
10 Comments
Nino October 17, 2010
“However, it is not dead…just underperforming.”
Might not be dead yet but it’s on life support. I just realized that its gone from my FIOS HD channels, I know it was there not long ago. It’s still on the SD channels but it’s an a la carte option. I’m sure people will rush to pay extra to view those magnificent programs.
Michael Rosenblum October 17, 2010
Believe me, taking equity positions in beginning cable channels is no bed of roses. Oxygen was no better. Sold for about $700 million at the end and all the shareholders got wiped out. The joke in the business goes that it was the project that turned Paul Allen into a millionaire.
Nino October 16, 2010
“There are those who will, but as we increasingly move to screens and video, even something so simple as getting a date or selling your house or putting video on your own website is going to require video. And if you can’t do it yourself, you’re going to have to pay someone to do it for you -which, considering how simple it is, would be crazy.”
Isn’t this what i just said above? It’s a great hobby for blogs, Youtube, Vimeo, etc. But I believe the topic was CurrentTV?
They are a broadcasting company and they need millions in revenue to remain operational, but evidently they have very little to sale that’s why they are in trouble. Waiting for the one illusive star to raise above the rest so they can capitalize from it is not a very good way to run a business. I also doubt that viewers will endure hours of crap hoping to see something exceptional, and I also doubt that advertisers will endure the same patience with their client’s money.
“My guess is that you have never made a dime as a writer. ”
And you guess wrong, again. We had the same conversation in the past and I also told you that one of my hobbies was screenwriting, I started with an Olivetti typewriter many years ago. I wrote 21 screenplays and sold the rights of six.
The last time that I saw statistical information about screenwriters was that 1 in 100,000 actually generate some revenue from his writing.
So are we talking hobby with a dream of success or are we talking business.
Is CurrentTV a dreamer or a business.
Michael Rosenblum October 16, 2010
So then I suppose you think that the only people who should learn to read and write would be those who hope to make a living from writing screenplays?
Is that the reason you learned to write? To sell a screenplay?
Anyone who wants to function in this society has to know how to write a coherent sentence.
Anyone who wants to function in the next few decades will have to know how to produce coherent video.
It is no longer the domain of the ‘select few’.
And my guess is also that if you were living solely off of what you earned from the sale of your writing, you would not be living where you are.
Nino October 16, 2010
Michael, you know that in spite of our ongoing discussions and disagreements I have the highest respect for you and your intelligence. This is why I’m flabbergasted when such intelligence comes up with some of the dumbest analogies and comparison.
Comparing writing to videos is one of them.
I am a writer that does it mostly as a hobby and every dollar earned is a bonus because I would do it even it I knew that there was no money to be made. Some people fish or play golf, I write and build things.
My writing has taken me across Europe, in Africa, Australia, in the middle of the Amazon jungle and countless of places around the globe, without ever spending a penny for travel and never leaving my house. Some of the places that I’ve been do not even exist.
I bet that J.K. Rowling, who you have mentioned countless of times as an example of someone who went from rag to riches thanks to her writing, never been to the places that made her famous and rich, and that’s because those places do not exist.
Writers can use their fantasies to make fortunes, they can be everywhere they want to at no extra cost. Believe me, I do both and I can tell you with authority, VIDEOS CAN’T.
Michael Rosenblum October 16, 2010
Nino
I continue to interact with you because I also have respect for you.
But you have to understand we are talking at loggerheads here.
Video literacy will indeed become a necessity in the future.
A great deal of what people want to communicate is going to be done in video.
We are only at the very very beginning of this transition.
As the world goes increasingly to screens (the average American already spends 8.5 hours a day staring at screens), the vast majority of the content of those screens is going to be in video. This is not my opinion (although I think it is right) but most of the people thinking about this agree.
Video is a language, like writing.
And in the not too distant future, people are going to ‘write’ a great deal of what they want to say, in video.
They are going to do this on their own, on their iPhones or whatever technology comes next.
This doesn’t mean that everything they produce in video is going to result in a ‘sale’. But as with the ability to write, the ability to communicate your ideas in video will be essential to survival and certainly to success.
People write tons every day without even thinking about selling it to anyone or getting paid.
You and I are writing now and neither of us is getting paid.
This is where video is going to go.
Of this I am fairly sure, and it is where I am positioning myself and the bulk of my business.
I am still talking to networks about the VJ thing, and deals do occasionally come across.
Next week I am starting with BET to take their folks into video.
The week after that, I am back to The BBC where I am training nearly 1,000 of their producers from nature, natural history, science- everything but news, ironically, to be video literate on their own.
But the real play here is teaching ‘regular’ people to communicate their ideas in video.
And the vast majority of them (I am, in fact, running a course right now from CUNY in NY), are not here to become TV cameramen.
A quick survey tells me that most of them have their own websites and simply want to post their own video.
I think this is the future.. and in this I am not alone.
Nino October 16, 2010
I’m trying to figure if we are agreeing or disagreeing.
I never said that being knowledgeable about video is a bad thing. For business or personal use knowing more about anything is a good thing.
But the conversation was about Current TV being in financial trouble and the reason is that viewers are not interested in cheap production that have absolutely no value to them whatsoever. Basically what you and Current TV has been trying to do is to get cheap or free work and turn it into your profit at the expense of those who created the work.
You are looking for a rose to grow out of a field of manure so you can capitalize from it. You might get one shot at anyone with talent because anyone that has any brain will find someone who will adequately compensate for their talent, and you or CurrentTV are not it.
We can stay here and talk to eternity but the facts remain that every one of your attempts to to turn other people free or cheap work into your money maker either on the web or on television have failed, every one of them. Current TV is following in the same footsteps.
All of you looking for freebees will have to start accepting the reality that all of your fancy words and reasoning will not be transformed into profits. The only one that counts in this business are the viewers and they have spoken loud and clear, over and over again, nobody with an IQ larger than their waist size is interested in those cheap videos. How many more failure you must endure to understand this.
Michael Rosenblum October 17, 2010
As an equity shareholder in Current, no one is more disappointed in its performance to date than I. However, it is not dead…just underperforming. I think the biggest problem with Current was that they didn’t understand the difference between an online video site where material is accessed non linear and for free and a TV network where you have to put on compelling TV shows. I have every hope that Mark Rosenthal, the new CEO will be able to straighten out both sides of the coin.
Nino October 16, 2010
“More than 24 hours of content are uploaded to Youtube every minute.
That’s just an astonishing number, and it shows that the desire to create content is there.”
The problem Michael is that there’s no money to be made in making videos, the money come from getting people to watch those videos.
I was sure that by now you got the message that nobody is interested in watching cheaply produced videos, this is why Current is not doing very well at all. I bet that you can ask 100 people on the street if they have ever heard of CurrentTV and 99 will tell you that have no clue of what it is.
You keep bringing up the massive volume of videos uploaded on Youtube but only a handful have high viewer counts, most don’t ever brake 100. Even the videos created by your highly publicized (now defunct) Travel Channel Academy, after years on Youtube most are still below the 1000 mark, you can’t make money like that. You would figure that with over 2000 people that took the TCA course at least they would be interested in seeing the videos that others who took the course are doing and bring the count up, but apparently not even these people were interested in watching those videos.
You are suggesting that CurrentTV make long format of the same stuff. I would think you learned from the “5Takes†series. Watching those shows was like sitting on the dentist chair and getting a one hour long root canal done, the moment the show was over so was the pain.
The problem with CurrentTV and all the other ventures that counted on getting free or very cheap material so they can make money without spending it, is that talent is expensive. Good talent is very hard to find even in broadcasting television, and nobody with intelligence, skills and talent would do it for free. Why should they when there’s an entire industry out there willing to pay them well for what they can do. All there’s left are those who whose work is worthless as far as the business goes. And this is the way that Current TV wants to stay in business?
The only way to make money in this business is to attract advertisers and sponsors, if the viewers count is low they’ll take their money somewhere else, is a very simple formula.
I would imagine that year after year of trying and failing you would learn that the public time is very valuable and when they sit in font of their TV (that most pay over $100 per month to get it into their living rooms) they don’t want to see amateurs work that most can do just as well themselves, why would they unless the content is incredibly interesting, and find any that it is.
The reality is that the destiny of this type of work is belonged to the web, on blogs where people do it for a cause, for fun or for whatever reason there is, but without any revenue.

It is not a business.
Michael Rosenblum October 16, 2010
My guess is that you have never made a dime as a writer. That, however, did not preclude you from learning how to read and write. Not everyone who becomes video literate is doing so to earn a buck from it. There are those who will, but as we increasingly move to screens and video, even something so simple as getting a date or selling your house or putting video on your own website is going to require video. And if you can’t do it yourself, you’re going to have to pay someone to do it for you -which, considering how simple it is, would be crazy.