There was ample attention in journalistic circles as Al Jazeera America had its premiere on Tuesday — particularly among those who could not watch.
The news channel — which replaced Current TV at 3 p.m. Eastern time — was expected to be carried by five of the country’s 10 biggest television providers, but one of those, ATT U-verse, dropped Current, and thus Al Jazeera, late Monday night.
That decision irritated some U-verse subscribers, who complained online about the company’s move and which further limited Al Jazeera America’s potential audience on Day 1.
On Tuesday evening, Al Jazeera said it was looking to the court system to resolve the contract dispute.
“Unfortunately ATT’s decision to unilaterally delete Al Jazeera America presented us with circumstances that were untenable — an affiliate that has willfully and knowingly breached its contractual obligations,” the broadcaster said in a statement. “We had no choice but to take this action and to enforce Al Jazeera’s rights under its agreement with ATT — and to compel ATT to do the right thing.”
The complaint, filed in Delaware Chancery Court, accuses ATT of wrongful termination and seeks restoration of the channel as well as damages.
ATT said it had not yet seen the lawsuit. In a statement, it hinted that Current’s transformation into Al Jazeera gave it an opening to drop the channel: “As a result of our inability to come to terms on a new agreement and due to certain breaches of the existing agreement, we have decided not to carry Current TV on U-verse.”
People who were curious about the new channel but were not able to access it on TV found that they could not access it online, either. It is not being live-streamed on the Internet, much to the disappointment of a small but vocal group of longtime Al Jazeera viewers in the United States.
Those fans had grown accustomed to watching the pan-Arab broadcaster’s existing English-language news channel, called Al Jazeera English, via the Internet. But on Monday, Al Jazeera English turned off its live stream for users in the United States. It also started to geo-block the news reports it posts on YouTube, so that instead of seeing the videos, American users saw a message that said, “The uploader has not made this video available in your country.”
Al Jazeera officials said privately that in the run-up to the premiere of the new American channel, they had little choice but to acquiesce to cable and satellite providers, which generally discourage online competition of the kind that Al Jazeera English previously represented. In effect they have sacrificed Internet distribution for a shot at traditional distribution.
Al Jazeera’s decision made a certain amount of sense, considering that most Americans spend far more time with television than the Internet. Still, complaints about the blockade piled up on Al Jazeera America’s Facebook page. One of the most-liked comments criticized the broadcaster for “going backward” by prioritizing TV over the Internet.
The concerns were shared by some Al Jazeera staff members, especially those who have been at Al Jazeera English, or A.J.E. for short, for years. The live stream and the YouTube page were the main ways their work was seen in the United States until the restrictions were put in place this week. The staff’s complaints were channeled by Rob Reynolds, an A.J.E. correspondent based in Los Angeles, who wrote on Facebook on Monday that “the great blackout has begun.”
“Al Jazeera is now blocking all A.J.E. videos from the U.S.A.,” Mr. Reynolds wrote. “It’s a form of corporate censorship that would make the Chinese Politburo jealous. And an incredible show of disrespect to all the reporters operating in the U.S. who have helped build Al Jazeera’s brand name in this country.”
Mr. Reynolds deleted the Facebook post, but not before other Al Jazeera staff members saw it and shared it with each other approvingly. Reached on Tuesday, Mr. Reynolds said the post was intended for family and friends and was written out of frustration. He deleted it, he said, because he concluded that it was unfair to his colleagues. He said his reference to censorship was aimed at the cable and satellite providers, not his employer.
Mohamed Nanabhay, the former head of Al Jazeera English’s Web site, pointed out in an e-mail message that there were thousands of Al Jazeera videos “embedded on third-party sites across the Internet that have suddenly become unavailable to audiences” because of the blockade.
Mr. Nanabhay said Al Jazeera America could have gone in a different direction and tried to appeal to the growing number of Americans dissatisfied with cable, the so-called cord-cutters who access video online.
A spokesman for Al Jazeera did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, but the head of social media for the new channel, Riyaad Minty, hinted about a possible solution. To those “who have lost the live streams,” he wrote on Twitter, “We hear you. We’re working on it.”
The new American channel was supposed to be available in about 48 million homes, according to Nielsen. The loss of U-verse reduces that to around 45 million.
Still, that is a decent start for a new channel: many other now-successful cable channels, including Fox News and MSNBC, started in fewer homes.
On Tuesday, Al Jazeera America was available to some subscribers of Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network, and Verizon FiOS. The biggest provider that is not yet carrying the new channel, Time Warner Cable, said it remained in negotiations about possibly carrying it in the future.
As for the channel itself, when it started Tuesday afternoon, it seemed to deliver on what it promised — serious, straightforward news. The first hour had a lengthy promotional video that said, among other things, “We will connect the world to America, and Americans to the world.” Then, at 4 p.m., the news began, led by the former CNN anchor Tony Harris, who updated viewers on the unrest in Egypt and a shooting at a school in Georgia.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/business/media/al-jazeera-makes-its-american-debut.html?partner=rss&emc=rss