• Satellite TV channel chaired by former Democratic Vice President Al Gore
• Aims to attract young viewers with homemade videos and stars like Gotham Chopra, son of New Age author Deepak Chopra

Current TV is a satellite television channel that commenced operations on August 1, 2005. Its Chairman of the Board is former Vice President Al Gore. Its Chief Executive Officer is Joel Hyatt, former Finance Chairman for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Among the network's largest investors are several prominent left-liberal and Democratic Party activists.

"We have no intention of being a Democratic channel, a liberal channel, or a TV version of Air America [Radio]," said Gore prior to Current TV's launch date. With Gore and Hyatt at their announcement of this enterprise was Sergey Brin, 31-year-old billionaire co-founder of Google, who praised the innovations of Current TV.  (The new network uses a Google tool to search personal video submissions, and features an hourly rundown of what topics people worldwide are currently searching for on Google.)

Says Current TV, "We slice our schedule into short segments that we call 'pods' -- each just a few minutes long. You'll see profiles of interesting people on the rise, intelligence on trends as they spring up around us, and international news from new perspectives." Current TV creates approximately half of its programs, and the other half are created and donated by its viewers, using home video cameras and software available at the Current TV website. Most viewer contributions run three minutes or less. The President of programming is CNN's former Chief Programming Officer David Neuman.

To help attract young viewers, Gore and Hyatt hired Anne Kallin Zehren, the publisher who launched the successful People Magazine spinoff Teen People, as Current TV's head of sales and marketing.

One of Current TV's hired on-air stars is Gotham Chopra, son of best-selling New Age author Deepak Chopra, author of the comic book and 2002 movie Bulletproof Monk, and veteran anchor and reporter familiar to the eight million in-class school viewers of Channel One.

Among Current TV's available "pods" of web-accessible information for its pod-people viewers are: "Current Soul" ("trends in spiritual awakening"); "Current Parent" ("advice to first-timers"); "Current Gigs" ("career guidance"); and "Current Rant" ("inviting viewers to let off steam").

A prominently featured section of Current TV's homepage is titled "Green," and features items that echo Al Gore's warnings about the allegedly grave threat of manmade global warming.

Current TV is an outgrowth of Newsworld International (NWI), which, prior to re-launching (with a new slate of programming) as Current TV in August 2005, described itself as North America's largest 24-hour cable and satellite television channel devoted to international news. In April 2005 NWI could be seen in almost 19 million U.S. homes, 11 million of these via the DirecTV satellite subscriber service owned by Rupert Murdoch. It aired news programming from several nations and nominally had its own news bureaus in Paris, Jerusalem, Moscow, Beijing, and Washington, DC. NWI programs were selected or produced by the Canadian Government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

In May 2004 INdTV Holdings, an investment group founded by Gore and Hyatt, purchased NWI from French conglomerate Vivendi Universal SA. The parties refused to divulge the purchase price, but America's business press generally pegged the cost at approximately $70 million.

Hyatt, in addition to his DNC ties, was the 1994 Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio, defeated when he ran for the vacated seat of his father-in-law Senator Howard Metzenbaum. In 1999 Hyatt was appointed by California's Democratic Governor Gray Davis to a six-year term on the state's Public Utilities Commission shortly before Davis' mismanagement of the state's electricity supply caused a financial crisis that led to the Governor's recall by voters.

INdTV Holdings has taken major funding from two equity investment firms. One is venture capital company Blum Capital Partners in San Francisco chaired by Richard Blum, husband of California Democratic U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein. The other is Los Angeles-based Yucaipa Companies, which has invested mostly in grocery stores and is headed by big-time Democratic Party fundraiser Ron Burkle. Among the Board members of Yucaipa Companies are former President Bill Clinton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. (Burkle reportedly bankrolled an $850 million failed bid by Jackson's son Yusef in May 2004 to purchase the troubled company that owns the Chicago Sun-Times. Burkle, as America's biggest owner of grocery stores, also supplied part of the pressure that led Anheuser-Busch to give a Chicago beer distributorship worth $35 million annually to Jackson's sons Yusef and Jonathan.)

Current TV investors include Real Networks Inc. Chairman Rob Glaser, who also invested in Air America Radio; Sun Microsystems co-founder and former executive Bill Joy, whose company contributed heavily to the Clinton-Gore ticket and profited when the Clinton-Gore administration brought Federal legal action against Sun competitor Microsoft Corporation; former (AOL) Time Warner co-Chief Operating Officer Bob Pittman, who helped create Viacom's cable music channel MTV; former Warner Brothers executive Warren Lieberfarb; and Hollywood actor Bradley Whitford, who plays a character resembling Clinton administration operative George Stephanopoulos on "The West Wing," a weekly TV drama set in a fictional Democratic White House.

Current TV's Advisory Board includes Orville Schell, Dean of the Journalism School at the University of California - Berkeley. Another Advisory Board member is Steve Jobs, CEO of Pixar Animation Studios and co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer. Al Gore sits on the Board of Apple Computer.