Broadband Jungle Blog

The Yahoo! Current Network arrives

Current TV co-founder and figurehead Al Gore yesterday announced the launch of a multi-channel VC2-themed collaboration between Current TV and Yahoo!, lavishly called the Yahoo! Current Network.

So far, four channels went live today:
Yahoo! Current Traveler, featuring the familiar mix of Current TV contributors with the occasional celebrity video thrown in. U2 front man Bono’s delicious launch present is a series of segments depicting “A Day in the life of The Edge”, showing an initially reluctant guitar player being woken by his singer in Miami.

Yahoo! Current Driver is celebrating the thrills of horsepower-hungry, gas-guzzling subcultures in surprisingly unashamed manner, considering that the network was founded by ‘Ozon-Man’ himself, as FishbowlLA so endearingly called Al Gore after An Inconvenient Truth opened in the spring.

Yahoo! Current Action takes on the extreme sports crowd that’s otherwise been abandoned outside of x-games season. Skateboarders, FMX fans, surfers and snowboarders will find everything they need here.

Yahoo! Current Buzz seems to be a compilation channel for now, with an occasional nugget from the Current TV archives thrown in.

News about an upcoming Current TV broadband collaboration with one of the Internet’s pioneers had been posted on the news podcaster’s website since early summer. Evidence pointed more towards Current TV shareholder and Yahoo! nemesis Google, on whose board the former vice-president resides. Google even hosts a branded viral clip segment on Current TV that’s now been moved to every hour on the half hour.

All in all, a great move for the cable network to increase their broadband foothold, but there’s a lot in it for Yahoo! as well, especially with their once very ambitious video content divisions all but abandoned up until now.

Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, in America

CNN / NBC / Yahoo! correspondent Kevin Sites recently completed his mission of spending an entire year in the Hot Zone of traveling through 22 armed conflicts in 19 countries in true 2.0 fashion: The journalist filed his compassionate reports of mostly unspeakable events from around the globe by blogging and writing an online diary, keeping a photo journal on Flickr and uploading video segments straight to the site.

What seemed like a trip to hell actually brought tremendous insight as he recounts in the post “Our Journey so Far:”

“That is one of the two most important lessons that I believe were revealed to me on this journey. First, that the world is indeed filled with conflict, pain and suffering, and that amazing people overcome it everyday.”

With a tremendous gift to gain trust wherever he went, Sites often pointed his camera directly at the lives of civilians affected by war. He’ll repost these stories in the order he experienced them over the next few weeks.

“This will give you a chance to see the full scope of our year's work in a condensed time period, while also allowing us to rest and retool for the launch of the next phase of the Hot Zone, which will primarily focus on putting a face on the untold stories in America.”

Way to go!