Al Jazeera English Still Waiting For US Broadcast Deals, Joins YouTube

Still an option undesired by all major satellite and cable television corporations in the US, Al Jazeera English has been living its first months as a 24-hour news channel inside America almost solely within the computer monitors of channel subscribers.

In addition to traditional broadcast methods, AJE streams both freely and at a cost to the viewer online, depending on the choice of video resolution. (Free looks bad.) Its streams have proven somewhat popular, though Al Jazeera hardly registers numbers on the Web that rival straight-to-TV mainstays like CNN, FOX News, and BBC World.

Nonetheless, the billion-dollar international news venture that is Al Jazeera English registers a good amount of viewers, and is moving ahead with efforts to attract more eyes on the Net. Its next big step is to push its content to the most widely-known video venue today: YouTube.

It’s clear why AJE wants to make headway on YouTube. The host is where the majority of video consumers on the Web flock to each and every day, and while YouTube publicity was underrated for some time prior to the emergence of the term “viral video”, it is now recognized as very potent indeed, and that may work in AJE’s favor.

Not that AJE is slated to create a hit, by any means. It’s just as hard to imagine Al Jazeera racking millions of views on a single clip as it would be to find the BBC, an organization that’s making similar strides to add content of its own to YouTube, tally up a massively popular phenomenon for itself.

But AJE won’t need to go huge on YouTube to achieve its goal. As long as the network stirs enough interest to provoke a critical mass of customers to ask their cable and satellite providers about the absence of the channel in the country - and even go so far as to demand that the provider(s) adopt AJE – the network will have made the right move in starting its own YouTube channel.

If that result does not come to be, however (the fact that a myriad of variables clearly do stand in the way makes such a change of heart by the largest of American media distributors equally probable and improbable), AJE will still not be any worse for the expansion. The generally open and uncensored forum that is YouTube is home to a great many accepting people, and the introduction of AJE clips (roughly a dozen per week to start) is likely to generate celebratory comments about the new perspective being shown. But the negativistas will be there to dish the insults and the innumerable bashes as well.

If AJE handles all public commentary about the network’s newest move well, both inside and outside YouTube, it’ll only increase its chances of turning more Americans on to its programming. With enough turned on to AJE on the Web, companies like Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner, and Echostar will be required to take notice of the shift in perception about the channel and give it the fair shake.