Current TV, the broadcast and online news network founded by former U.S. Vice-President and Nobel Award winner Al Gore, has been granted a licence for operation in Canada.
The service provides news and current affairs content submitted by users and professional alike. The website provides tool to rank the online submissions, and the popular stories have a greater chance to be played on-air.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) made its announcement conditional on certain terms, among them a commitment for 35 per cent of the user-submitted content to be Canadian.
Current TV in Canada will be joint venture between Al Gore’s channel and the CBC. According to the CRTC decision, the CBC owns an 80 per cent interest of Current TV’s Canadian branch corporation
The CBC says it still requires approval from the Treasury Board in order to proceed with launching the channel, expected in the fall.
CBC Executive Vice President English Programming announced a partnership between the two entities last November, saying the unique combination of user generated and professional content “collapses the distinction between the programmers and the audience, so that the audience becomes the programmers. “You have to think of it not as a conventional broadcast network, but as something utterly flattened. It’s much more like a social network,” he said at the time.
For more on the CRTC’s decision, visit
http://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2009/2009-335.htm