Current TV, the global television network, which is distributed on cable and satellite, is very different online.
Current.com, launched last October, is starting to get traction as a site built around user-generated videos, photos, text commentary and citizen reporting.
According to numbers provided to Current by Omniture, the site had one million unique visitors in February, up sevenfold since its launch, a spokeswoman told me.
(The most recent Nielsen Online numbers show Current.com at 412,000 monthly unique visitors for February. This sort of discrepancy between internal numbers crunched from server logs and traffic calculated by monitoring services like Nielsen and comScore is not uncommon.)
Unlike Current TV, which uses "pro-sumer" video segments from a network of contributors along with studio productions and acquired content, the online entity is built around uploads from a growing community interested in a range of topics from politics to culture to technology to sex and relationships.
There is some very cool functionality that allows members to vote on content in a sort of community-based aggregation system. Check it out.
I was in San Francisco last week for a tour of the Current headquarters and had an interview with Justin Gunn, who heads online programming.
Pasted below is a video post of Current co-founder Al Gore on the topic of gay rights. Posted in January, his video has gotten over 100 comments.
In our next segment about Current, Justin takes us a tour of the very cool headquarters.
