How To Build A Television Network
Our short-term goal is to create a daily news program for broadcast on national TV and on the Internet, but our long-term goal is to build a complete network dedicated to promoting the ideals and ideas of liberty on cable TV and satellite dish TV in the United States. The news program will be a test case to prove that a market exists for this kind of television, so that advertisers will be ready to support a full network. We believe that we can and will build such a network.
As many of you know, former Democratic Senator Al Gore helped launch the Current network, which is now available under the Current logo on most cable and satellite systems. If you haven't checked it out, turn on your TV and look for the Current channel in your provider's preview guide. A lot of what Current offers is rather disjointed, and their model for imitating Internet surfing via visuals is a bit confusing to some people. Nevertheless, they are attracting paid advertising. If they can do it, so can we, since what we have to offer (liberty) will be far more interesting to more people.
Current TV derives a lot of their content from private individuals around the country who upload videos they've made to the www.current.tv website, which are then reviewed and selected for broadcast. There's no reason we couldn't also take advantage of this kind of policy. Ron Paul supporters have been very creative over the past year in creating their own videos. Some of those videos have even contained newsworthy content. Once we successfully acquire our own channel, we will implement a similar policy in order to put the best of the pro-liberty video content on national TV. In fact, we will test this model even before we have a full network by selectively using newsworthy videos on the daily news program.
One Stage At A Time
What we're talking about here is actually a three-stage process. In general terms, here's how it works.
The first stage involves setting up an Internet-based broadcast on a daily basis. That's how we'll get our feet wet and start to develop an audience. It also gives us our vehicle for beginning to make in-roads with potential advertisers.
We had originally envisaged the second stage as one where we contact existing cable TV channels that don't run daily news programs and buy time from them for that purpose. We still might end up taking this intermediate step, but our creation of a new funding device (which will be publicly announced around July 1, 2008) just might make this step unnecessary. If that happens, then the second stage can be skipped.
Stage three is where we launch our own network (channel) across the country. There are more than a dozen major cable and satellite providers, including Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Direct TV, and Dish Network, along with a number of small, independent cable providers in places around the country. In this stage, we will contact them to negotiate making a channel available on their networks. That's how we will finally get our own 24/7/365 network where we control all the programming.