The British affiliate of the American channel shut shop in March last year which is the channel feed which South African viewers got.
When BSkyB decided to drop Current TV and no longer carry the TV channel, Current TV was forced to shutter its London-based channel while the American side of Current TV which was started by the former American vice president Al Gore in 2005, kept limping along.
The New York Times just broke the news that the Qatar based news channel is close to taking over Current TV which it will redevelop into a new news channel based in New York. Al Jazeera has been struggling to get onto pay-TV platforms in the United States where operators don't want to carry the news channel.
According to The New York Times Current TV could be changed and renamed to Al Jazeera America. Al Jazeera already runs the Al Jazeera news channel in English from Qatar as well as a separate Al Jazeera channel in Arabic. Current TV is run from San Francisco.
UPDATE Thursday 3 January 2013 - Variety reports that the deal is worth $500 million.
There is now a statement about the sale: "We are proud and pleased that Al Jazeera, the award-winning international news organization, has bought Current TV," Al Gore says in a statement. "Current Media was built based on a few key goals: To give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling. Al Jazeera, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us."
