• by Shankar Gupta , March 7, 2006

PoliticsTV.com, a progressive political news Internet video channel featuring news, opinion and humor, will officially launch today.

The site, which went into beta testing in January, will contain four separate channels--The Candidate Channel, PTVNews, The Satire Channel, and the Democracy Channel. The Candidate Channel will solicit videos from progressive candidates running for state, federal, and local office, while PTVNews will show editorially created segments, including coverage of blogs, the right-wing media, and satirical profiles of political figures. The Satire Channel will solicit humorous content from PoliticsTV.com viewers, and the Democracy Channel--which, during the beta, was dubbed "D-Span," but was changed after the C-Span network protested--solicits videos from advocacy groups and think tanks about progressive issues of the day.

The site will be ad-supported, with in-stream video spots. The Ad sales staff will focus on socially conscious companies and political advertisers. The site is also a member of the BlogAds network, which places display advertisements on a collection of both high- and low-traffic blogs around the Net.

Dan Manatt, PoliticsTV.com producer, said the site is unabashedly focused on the progressive viewer. "There's a lot to be said when it comes to preaching to the choir. Some of the most successful media are choir-preaching media," he said, citing the conservative FoxNews.

To promote the network, PoliticsTV.com took out a slate of BlogAds, and established cross-promotion deals with progressive radio talk show hosts. Additionally, Manatt said, the channel will be "aggressively" pursuing links from progressive bloggers by profiling them and putting their content on the network, and hoping that the bloggers reciprocate.

Last year, Manatt was the producer of a similar venture, DemsTV.com. That site now is defunct, except for a trailer advertising PoliticsTV.com.