Week 6 | Case Study - Current TV

Current TV houses so much content it becomes hard to define what the actual main purpose of the site is. I have been watching video after video and trying to determine exactly that for hours now and although it is entertaining and at times interesting I cant quite put my finger on what it achieves. Does it actually drive what content is going to be played in America?


I am not altogether sure, it doesn’t feel anything like Media Storm in that it has a much wider depth of content and a very busy structure that is not really that intuitive. I thought that by picking a genre from the submenu across the top banner, say Music, that I would find specific content just about music. What I did find was a bunch of disorganised content with no real lead to whether I would be watching video or listening to audio or reading static news. This was frustrating.


I also find American humour particularly annoying, I don’t get the one liner gags of David Letterman and when commercial mainstream spoof movies are released you wont find someone running further from the Cinema than me. I am mostly insulted by their commentary and stupid jokes. What is interesting about this drivel of content is the user generated stuff.


In a disorganised way if you are to find genuine original content in the site you will find that a whole gamut of different users are posting their thoughts on what they just watched. This acts in the genuine Web 2.0 way that this form of multimedia should. Users are able to say what they truly feel and it appears that just about anyone can contribute with Vlogs or Blogs, comments and just voting or using the numerous ways of tagging the content. Mostly it appears to be unmoderated, but how you could be really sure is beyond me after trawling through the site for the past few hours I am mostly just annoyed with it than interested.


I much prefer the serious side to MediaStorm where genuine artists are telling honest narratives that have meaning and try to put something positive out to the masses than the not-funny-slapstick content on this messy site. Thumbs Down from Dan.