Plans for the soon-to-be-rebranded Al Jazeera America include a fresh slate of content which may not have room for previously-existing Current programming — but you know who doesn’t seem that worried about it? One of Current’s biggest personalities.

Cenk Uygur, of the nightly live series The Young Turks, came to Current after his relationship with MSNBC went south last year; since then, the opinionated host has become one of Current’s most-watched anchors.

But that’s not why Uygur seems extremely confident about his show’s potentially uncertain fate. See, The Young Turks was born initially as a radio series in 2002, then expanded to YouTube in December 2005. Currently, TYT has nearly 500,000 YouTube subscribers and over 900,000,000 views on its primary channel. Or, as Uygur puts it on Twitter:

For knucklehead conservatives making jokes about @theyoungturks because of @current sale, TYT has over 40 million views a month online.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) January 3, 2013

Facts: @theyoungturks network has over a billion views online, 40 mil views, 15.5 million unique viewers and 100 mil min. viewed per month.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) January 3, 2013

With our 15.5 million unique viewers a month online, @theyoungturks is much bigger than Rush Limbaugh and almost any cable news show on TV.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) January 3, 2013

These stats refer to The Young Turks‘s YouTube channel, not the Current series of the same name, which will continue for at least the next three months before the conclusion of the Al Jazeera takeover.

However, there’s been some confusion about the difference between TYT the YouTube channel and TYT the live Current show. This lead to questions about whether or not The Young Turks had been sold to Al Jazeera along with Current — questions which Uygur addressed in a video released on Thursday, frankly entitled “TYT Is Independent, Not Owned by Current or Al Jazeera.”

In the video, Uygur refers to the connection between the two iterations of the TYT brand as “a mutually beneficial relationship and we hope to continue that.” He then showed off a little bit of Arabic.

According to the New York Times, the Al Jazeera acquisition does mean that layoffs are coming for at least some Current staffers. But Uygur will still have a platform for getting his voice out — and more importantly, an audience.

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Alsayeed and some of his friends had located their camera on a rooftop in the Homs neighborhood of Babaamr, according to Bambuser. Very graphic footage of his body has since shown up on YouTube, and Bambuser relayed one of his latest messages on its blog. It reads, in part:

“Babaamr is facing a genocide right now. I will never forgive you for your silence. You all have just give us your words but we need actions.”

Live streaming was an essential tool in the Arab spring, but has also been under constant attack by the embattled regimes. Last week, Bambuser reported that its site had been blocked by Syria. Ustream and Livestream told us that they hadn’t seen any interference from the Syrian regime so far.

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Screenshot of Volkswagen's enhanced Twitter page (click to enlarge)

On Wednesday, Twitter switched on enhanced brand pages for accounts owned by National Public Radio, NBC News, Volkswagen, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, and Anobii, among others. This is the first batch of premium Twitter pages from companies other than the handful of launch partners (including Coca-Cola, the American Red Cross, and American Express) who unveiled enhanced brand pages in December.

A quick refresher: As part of the head-to-toe redesign Twitter first announced back on December 8, Twitter said it would give companies, brands, media organizations and celebrities the ability to have “enhanced” profile pages with extra design options and content feed controls. While the general redesign started rolling out to the majority of Twitter users nearly two months ago, the company took a bit more time in pushing the makeover for its first class users.

A Twitter spokesperson tells me the enhanced brand pages “will continue to roll out to advertising partners, as well as other select partners, charities, media organizations, and individuals” over the coming weeks and months. As Twitter gets more serious about generating revenue, it makes sense that it would want to create a more welcoming environment to big-name brands — the types of users who may want to buy more ads on the site after they see how nice their spruced up pages are.

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Al Jazeera Sports has picked up international La Ligue rights (€90 million per year), most Champions League rights in France (€60 million per year) and has reportedly trumped a joint TF1-M6 bid for French rights to Euro 2012 with a €130 million offer.

“We would expect (Sky Sports) to spend +15-25% more than in the previous round of negotiation in 2009,” says investment analysis firm Bernstein. “We envision a scenario in which BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) retains all but one packages for the next 3-year block but faces competition (for all six packages available) by at least two other entities, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) and Al Jazeera.”

That could raise Sky’s payment to up to £675 million per season. A 25 percent price hike is consistent with increases Sky Sports has made in the last two bidding rounds, however.

Any entrance by Al Jazeera Sports to the UK could hurt ESPN, which currently holds a minority of Premiership rights beside Sky Sports’ majority, more than Sky Sports, in Bernstein’s scenario.

Bernstein also reckons Al Jazeera Sports could bid up to €730 million for Eurosport. But the firm is also persisting with a strange forecast it has been making lately…

“As European regulators are turning increasingly hostile to exclusive contracts, it may prove impossible for pay TV companies to keep key premium content away from Apple.”

Few people currently consider Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has ambitions to own premium content, even though it has proved masterful as a distributor and retailer of content owned by other entities.

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BBC Worldwide has taken a great leap forward in getting U.S. carriage for its BBC World News channel by striking a deal with Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), the largest U.S. cable operator.

Comcast’s Xfinity TV is adding the channel in six major markets, including Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, with plans to offer it in nearly 15 million U.S. homes by 2012′s end.

BBC Worldwide (the BBC’s commercial and overseas wing) has been building up its content and ad sales operation for BBC.com/news over the last couple of years, but had still been seeking significant TV traction beside its own BBC America channel. NPR executive editor Dick Meyer is leaving to run and expand the BBC’s U.S. news coverage as the 2012 presidential election nears; previously Meyer was at CBS (NYSE: CBS) News.

Al Jazeera English, which is now a firm fixture on many TVs outside the Arab world, has still not yet made the leap in the States.

It is available in a handful of U.S. city cable networks in New York; Washington DC; Burlington, VT; Toledo, OH; and Bristol, RI. But, as online head Mohamed Nanabhay told paidContent in 2009, most of the new carriage is coming from new online platforms like Boxee, Roku, Livestation, Al Jazeera, YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) and Pulse, as well as through Creative Commons re-use.

The latest are Google TV and the Chrome browser. While the app for the former offers text stories, on-demand video and a notification ticker, with live streams coming later, the browser extension includes the live channel as well as a Chrome-esque on-demand video carousel.

While large-scale cable traction continues to be elusive, the coming connected TV boom could mean an even bigger opportunity for Al Jazeera to get to U.S. televisions.

Nanabhay (via Broadband TV News): “We are constantly looking for new ways to deliver our content and interact with our audiences. Our online philosophy has always been to make our world-class content available to audiences on the platforms they choose.”

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Livestation CEO Lippe Oosterhof wrote in a blog post today that 53 million unique users have visited Livestation.com in 2011. That’s already close to 10 times as much as all of 2010, and the year isn’t even over yet. Oosterhof didn’t want to break out numbers by channel when asked via email how much of this was due to Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Arab Spring, but he told me, “it has driven a lot of awareness and attention and traffic wise it is one of the biggest channels.”

He added that many viewers come for one of the more popular channels like BBC or Al-Jazeera, but then discover other news channels on the site. “We try to foster an experience that allows viewers to have access to all points of view,” Oosterhof said.

Livestation has also seen increased traffic for its desktop client and mobile site, and its new iOS app is now clocking more than one million streams per month. The company is working on an Android app as well as an app for Samsung’s connected TV platform, and Oosterhof told me that it will provide apps for other platforms as soon as standards in this space emerge.

The company is providing most of its content in a free, ad-supported format, and Oosterhof told me that Livestation has seen great success with pre-roll advertising in Europe and the U.S., and is hoping to extend that to the Middle East and Southeast Asia as well. It is also offering premium subscriptions for some of its content.

Subscribers can, for example, get access to Al-Jazerra English in HD, and also stream CNN International in some markets. Subscriptions currently represent only a fifth of the company’s revenue, but Oosterhof said Livestation wants to grow the premium service substantially with the launch of new premium packages later this year.

Livestation’s success story is somewhat reflective of news consumption in the age of social media. During the uprising in Egypt, countless folks all over the world turned to Al-Jazeera in part because people on Twitter and Facebook linked to the network. Following the Japanese earthquake, local broadcaster NHK became known worldwide for providing firsthand information. This type of immediacy helps Livestation, which provides news sources from all around the world.

But what about traditional cable news networks? Take CNN for example. It recently unveiled its new CNN Everywhere service, which offers impressive features, including live HD video. However, it’s restricted to U.S. residents that happen to be customers of one of the participating pay TV providers. Even some people who should have access might not make it their first choice.

After all, what are you going to do when news breaks while you’re in the office and away from the TV: try to figure out your pay TV credentials to authenticate on CNN — or turn to a less restricted offering like Livestation?

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While there are doubtless plenty of Americans who will wake up tomorrow to be greeted with the news that a special operations mission has killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, millions discovered the news Sunday night on Twitter or Facebook. And while they may have tuned into the news on television, many more watched the live stream from the White House on the web, or streamed it from Al-Jazeera, CNN or countless other sites offering the news in real time. And some likely followed it via Twitter for far longer than the brief address. Update: After President Obama’s speech last night, Twitter said it was fielding about 4,000 tweets a second.

From the time of the reported first tweet on the topic, coming from @KeithUrbahn who lists himself as “Chief of Staff, Office of Donald Rumsfeld, Navy Reserve intel officer, and owner of two miniature dachshunds. Opinions are my own,” which was posted around 10:25 p.m. EDT, Twittersphere and Facebook denizens followed a compressed news cycle as folks waited for confirmation from someone, anyone.

Excitement. These tweets quickly followed expressing a tone of excitement and the thrill of being first to report potentially huge news.

Uncertainty. Almost as fast as the news hit, the doubters came out questioning whether the news was legitimate or not. Some were waiting for the news venue of their choice to weigh in, while others were waiting for the coming statement from the president.

Searching for Validation. Torn between wanting the news to be true and the fear of being wrong, folks turned either reverential in their love of Al-Jazeera or the New York Times or whoever was already reporting details or scornful of those who might have been more cautious.

Confirmation. The White House confirmed, and now the search for meaning, data and tasteless jokes will begin in earnest.

Jokes, Profits and Platitudes. Once confirmed, the platitudes, jokes and attempts to profit either via owning a domain, a twitter identity (say hello to @ghostosama) or the umpteenth joke about the birthers now asking for a long form death certificate are free to escalate. Meanwhile Google updates its Maps to show the location where bin Laden was killed.

Action. This is where Facebook and social media really shine. From tweets about people seeking more information from friends to those seeking to find out if others are meeting at Ground Zero by checking out a live web cam of the site, people now can learn about news and do something.

Real Analysis. Not on Twitter, unless it’s via a link to a blog or a newspaper. What insight on geopolitics can one really offer in 140 characters?

Maybe it’s time to recognize these stages, or come up with more thoughtful ones, so we can recognize where we are when we tune into this cycle and behave accordingly. As journalists, we often get scoops or hear of news and have to make a similar set of judgments before reporting it, but on Twitter, what often starts out as gossip now has the weight of news. As recipients, we have no way to judge at first glance though if it’s real or wishful thinking. Perhaps it’s time we gave ourselves a better set of tools?

With additional reporting by Cyndy Aleo.

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Syria has seen pro-democracy protests for weeks now, and the ruling regime has increasingly turned violent following a nationwide day of protests on Friday, April 22. Just this week, tanks have entered the city of Deraa, where the uprising began more than a month ago.

As happened in Libya and Egypt, the increase in violence was met with a local media blackout. The regime has expelled a number of foreign correspondents, making it harder for traditional news organizations to operate from within the country.

But just as in those earlier protests, there has also been a steady stream of YouTube videos coming out of Syria documenting the violence. A YouTube spokesperson told us late Wednesday that the site has seen more than 9,400 videos tagged “Syria” or Syria in Arabic in the last seven days. Some of the videos of recent weeks purportedly show scenes of very graphic violence as security forces open fire on protesters, while others reportedly depict troop movements towards Deraa. Last week, YouTube users could witness what was described by uploaders as mass demonstrations against the Syrian regime:

YouTube has been collaborating with the citizen media curator Storyful to showcase some of these videos as part of its Citizentube project. Storyful Editorial Director David Clinch recently told us his company is vetting all its sources through traditional journalistic research and it has “a very high degree of confidence” in the videos curated by his company.

Syria had censored the Internet for years and only recently unblocked access to Facebook and YouTube. The measure was meant to appease citizens and show the regime was willing to reform. Data from Google shows YouTube traffic went sharply up after the site got unblocked.

It looks like YouTube is still largely accessible from within Syria, but there have been reports of phone and Internet access going down in select cities. Citizens of crisis-stricken countries from within the region have, in the past, often resorted to sneakernet access to get the word out about protests and violence against protesters, with Libyans smuggling flash memory drives with mobile phone footage out of the country after authorities shut down Internet access.

However, Global Voices activist Leila Nachawati reminded us this week that the videos coming out of Syria these days, while undoubtedly helping to break down the media blackout, don’t necessarily change the situation on the ground:

“We should keep in mind that although citizens may be winning the communication battle, the weapons are still in the hands of those who have the power over people´s lives.”

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