Al-Jazeera, the powerful pan-Arab news channel, will see its US distribution leap to roughly 40 million homes after reaching a deal to buy Al Gore’s ailing Current TV.
Terms of the transaction were not released, but the price tag is believed to be around $500 million.
Current’s low-rated programming is expected to end in the spring — to be replaced by regular shows from the Qatar-financed network, which is likely to be renamed Al-Jazeera America, according to a report.
Gore, who will likely get a seat on the board of the new company, was expected to get a nice check from the government of Qatar last night.
Al-Jazeera will likely move its headquarters from Doha, Qatar, to New York.
While Gore and Current TV co-founder Joel Hyatt said in a statement they were “proud and pleased” to sell to Al-Jazeera, the reaction from at least one cable company was less than cheery.
Time Warner Cable, which counts 12 million households, said it was immediately removing Current from its lineup. Current reached about 60 million households before the move.
“Our agreement with Current has been terminated, and we will no longer be carrying the service,” TWC said in a statement. “We are removing the service as quickly as possible.”
To date, Al-Jazeera has had a hard time gaining meaningful carriage on US cable systems. Even when it did gain distribution, it was often located high up in the listings and gained few viewers.
The deal with Current could change that.
Al-Jazeera has won both praise and criticism in the US for its sometimes anti-West coverage. The news outfit won notoriety thanks to its exclusive access to videos of Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In more recent years, Al-Jazeera has drawn ratings by giving a voice to dissent through its aggressive coverage of the Arab Spring. It employs veteran interviewer David Frost.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee last March that viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the US “because it’s real news.”
“You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news, which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners,” Clinton said.
Current TV ultimately failed to win enough viewers or ad dollars to make it a success. The new owner may absorb some Current staff, a source said.
Separately, Al-Jazeera has been expanding its ownership of sports rights through its beIN Sports subsidiary. The firm acquired rights to show US soccer team qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup.
Roughly 60 percent of Al-Jazeera America programming will be produced in the US, according to the New York Times, which first reported on the deal.