I'm not at all impressed by Current.tv. It's not that the content is bad (it's bearable), but the approach is completely and utterly backwards. Current is what happens when some tv execs catch a whiff of "user-generated content" and decide to shoehorn it into an increasingly irrelevant distribution model. The latest Alexa rankings show the scale of the problem - after the huge fanfare on launch day, Current has pretty much tanked.
Let's backtrack for a second. Current.tv is a cable and satellite channel powered by "viewer-created content". It launched back in April 2005. But this isn't user-generated content as we know it. Instead of providing a platform for the hundreds of thousands of "amateur" vloggers and video producers out there, Current sets the agenda: they decide what should be produced and what's "good enough" to go to air. They even require a 3 month holding period while they decide whether your content is worthy of their esteemed channel. Umair Haque nailed the problem back in July '05:
Look, peer production is not about ordering prosumers around to meekly do your bidding. It's about building a platform/community that does theirs....In a sense, this is the same kind of mistake that 1.0 dot commers made - assuming that the www was just another distribution/mktg channel. Dot com 2.0 peer production plays like Current seem to be assuming more and more that the www is just another production channel (supply chain, if ya like). It's emphatically not.