Keith Olbermann Goes To Current TV

Current event?

It would seem that Keith Olbermann, formerly host of Countdown, MSNBC’s top rated show is going to go to Current TV.

As one of the founders of Current (the original Current TV was based on my idea), it would seem a moment to comment.

The original idea behind Current was to provide a platform for the ‘democratization’ of video and television.

With 56 billion videos uploaded to Youtube in the past 5 years, this would seem to be a valid idea.

Like all good ideas, things go wrong sometimes – often in fact.

When we first launched Current, we did a ‘college tour’ across the country, making people aware of what we were planning.  A few weeks later, truckloads (literally) of DVDs and VHS tapes (this was before you could really put video online) came pouring into the offices in San Francisco.  Clearly, we had tapped into something very real.

After we had set up Current, I told Al Gore and Joel Hyatt (the owners), that what was needed next was take the 200 best people who had submitted their stuff and put them through an intensive training program and create a kind of Video Peace Corps.

Training was essential.

Once we had built an ‘Army’ of content creators, we could begin to produce great and original programming.

They didn’t buy it.

They saw the mountains of videotape that had come in for free and thought they saw the future.

Al Gore said as much to me:  “We’ve moved beyond you now”.

Fine.

I learned two lessons from Current:

1.  There is an enormous appetite in the public to create content.

2.  99% of what came in was junk.

It was junk because no one had ever taught them what to do.  They were like peasants in Germany after Gutenberg invented the printing press being given pencils and told to write great novels.  What you need is an education in how to do it and what to do.

Thus, NYVS.com and all the Academies.

And what of Current?

You can’t just throw a bunch of stuff on the air and say ‘now this’!

It does not work.

Keith Olbermann is a remnant of an old kind of TV – the guy at the desk.

Will it rate?

As a shareholder in Current, I hope so.

As a ‘video revolutionary’, I am sorry that Current has chosen to go this path, as opposed to the far more interesting one they could have traveled.

But that is show business,