File Under "Duh"

The surprise is not really that Al Jazeera America is shutting down (my link is the Glenn Greenwald's excellent and extensively linked-out article), but that it ever existed in the first place. The multichannel TV dial has a number of fully distributed news services of one flavor or another:

• CNN
• MSNBC
• Fox News
• HLN
• CNBC
• The Weather Channel

As well as less-than-fully distributed channels like:

• Bloomberg TV
• CNBC World
• Fox Business
• BBC World News
• France 24
• RT
• Fusion
• One America
• Newsmax
• Accuweather
• WeatherNation
• The Blaze
• Free Speech TV
• Univision Noticias
• CNN en Español

An Internet-distributed news channel:

• CBSN

And lots of regional news networks like:

• NY1
• News 12 Long Island
• NECN

In short, this isn't a market segment with a lack of programming.

It is also hard to imagine that branding the channel "Al Jazeera America" was what US news consumers wanted. Irrespective of the quality of the programming on the channel (which I thought was good, from the little I saw, if somewhat stilted in a PBS/BBC kind of way), the name "Al Jazeera" was most closely associated with the co-owned Arabic-language Al Jazeera news service made famous as the preferred outlet for Osama bin Laden's videos during the post-9/11 era. As the proud possessor of a marketing degree from arguably the finest school for brand managers, I believe that's too much to overcome.

The Future of Current

The New York Post reports today that Current TV, the network best known as the brief post-CNBC home of available-now Keith Olbermann, is on the block.

A 60-million subscriber network is usually worth at least $15 per subscriber or $750 million, sometimes considerably more. However, one wonders what, exactly, is the programming opportunity for Current. Fox News is the news service on the right, MSNBC is the news service on the left and CNN is the news service in the middle. Not that Current is, strictly speaking, a news service, being more about talk shows than newscasts. Headline News has also morphed from a news service into a talk show channel.

Despite the attractive qualities of news programming (original, live and essentially DVR-proof), there is little evidence to suggest that television distributors are looking for more news channels. CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, Weather Channel and C-SPAN's services also cover the news in various ways, as well as every major broadcaster. If distributors want another news channel, there are many to be had, particularly international services like BBC World News (which Comcast has rolled out in a big way, in the aftermath of its acquisition of NBC), France 24 (an English-language service widely carried by Time Warner Cable in New York), RT (the former Russia Today, with the Russian perspective on the news, also in English) and, Al Jazeera English.

That said, Current's "shelf space" has value. If Current were to be acquired by an existing US programmer, it could be bundled with their existing portfolio of channels and rebranded. Perhaps the best fit of all would be for Disney/ABC and Univision to acquire Current to jumpstart the distribution of their new English-language, Latino-targeted news service. That service current-ly exists as a website, but is planned to launch for cable distribution in 2013 from a base in Miami.

Another take: USA Today's Michael Wolff sees Current going into the hands of an online media company like Huffington Post or TMZ