Al Gore Wants To Democratize Television, Leaks 'Crowdsourced TV'

What if you could flip the mass media power of the TV industry funnel, making your viewers your producers, and then using communities to source, distribute and promote professionally curated content? Well, then you might have something that looked a little bit like user-generated video portal YouTube combined with a traditional television network.

That appears to be what Current Media plans to introduce soon, Chairman Al Gore hinted at during the closing keynote Tuesday at MEDIA magazine's Outfront Conference in New York. "Soon we will unveil a new, related concept that we call Crowdsourced TV," Gore disclosed during a speech that focused largely on the concept of a "sustainable advertising" marketplace, and what advertisers, agencies and the media could to do to help make it a reality. The industry needs to, Gore asserted, because, "the consumer is way ahead of us on this." Gore was alluding to the fact that consumers have already embraced social media platforms and new, inexpensive, professional quality technologies that have made them as much a part of the conversation as any marketer or media conglomerate, and that the best option for the media industry is to embrace it.