SAN FRANCISCO – Six months after its debut, Vice President Gore’s TV network for young people is cranking out an unusual and intriguing product, but the fledgling channel is struggling to reach viewers and now faces daunting competition from some of the biggest players on the Internet.

Billed as “the TV network created by the people that watch it,” Current TV’s hook is that many of its video segments are contributed by viewers who shoot with their own digital camcorders and edit with the sophisticated software available for home computers.

The start-up is just one of Mr. Gore’s high-profile undertakings, which include a film about global warming slated for release in May. He has also delivered lengthy speeches, warning that the Constitution is in “grave danger” and pillorying President Bush for violating civil liberties of Americans.

From the outset, Mr. Gore has insisted Current TV is not part of his political agenda, although he has said he sees the venture as an effort to “democratize television.”

When the channel launched last August, industry experts painted it as a quixotic effort. Like other start-up networks, Current faced the challenge of convincing cable and satellite operators to carry the product sight unseen. A legal services entrepreneur who is Mr. Gore’s lead partner in the venture, Joel Hyatt, devised a way to short-cut that process by buying a little-watched network from Canada, Newsworld International.

The acquisition, which reportedly cost $70 million, got the new network into about 17 million homes through Time Warner and Comcast digital cable and a popular satellite carrier, DirecTV. That number has risen to about 20 million through the growth of those services, but so far the channel has failed to make any major deals to add new outlets. Mr. Hyatt, who serves as Current TV’s CEO, told the San Francisco Chronicle the network will ultimately need 50 million subscribers to be viable.

The limited “carriage,” as it’s called in the industry, makes it difficult to assess how the channel is doing. Just 18% of households with television are able to see the network. Firms like A.C. Nielsen do not provide ratings for Current TV.

Still, the lack of ratings has not kept major advertisers from signing with Current TV. Sony, L’Oreal and Toyota are among its sponsors. According to analysts, the 18- to 34-year-olds the Gore network is pitched toward are so coveted that companies don’t insist on precise measurement.

“Some of it is a conceptual sell,” an analyst with a division of Nielsen, Larry Gerbrandt, said. “It’s a hard demographic to reach, which is actually very attractive to advertisers.”

Alex Dolan, the Current TV spokesman, said the network judges its progress by the volume of e-mail feed back from the audience, as well as the number of videos submitted by viewers. So far, he said, about 1,000 videos have come in and about 140 have made it to air.

“We’ve gotten really thousands of emails from people that have been very effusive about what they see on the network. That has been our biggest gauge,” Mr. Dolan said.

To capture the elusive eyeballs of the iPod generation, Mr. Gore’s channel has also been experimenting with some raunchy fare. In a segment titled “Hooking Up,” women loosened up by tequila suck on lollipops as they muse about their sex lives. There’s no nudity, but there are graphic discussions of “fingering” and under what conditions they will “put out.” Another recent segment included a photo of sex toys.

That kind of material might alarm Mr. Gore’s wife, Tipper, who once led a crusade against explicit song lyrics, but the former vice president has apparently taken it in stride.

The Manhattan-based director of the “Hooking Up” videos, Bradley Glenn, said Mr. Gore seemed to be a fan when the two met in New York last October. “He said, ‘Oh yeah. The girls with the lollipops,'” Mr. Glenn said.

Current TV liked the video Mr. Glenn sent in so much that the network commissioned five more “Hooking Up” segments, which evoke HBO’s “Taxicab Confessions.” “So far it’s been a great relationship,” he said. “It is giving an opportunity to someone like me and my team, who are really just starting out.”

Current TV programming jumps abruptly from topic to topic, with a hip looking presenter in Los Angeles introducing each video. Most “pods,” as the network calls them, last between two and eight minutes, which makes them substantially longer than most stories on network or cable news.

One afternoon last week, a segment about British soldiers beating prisoners in Iraq was butted up against a look at new video games. That might be jarring to some, but it doesn’t seem to faze the Web-savvy audience.

“It’s the closest thing to the Internet that’s on TV, and vice versa,” Mr. Glenn, 30, said. Current TV courts that effect by using high-tech graphics and an onscreen progress bar showing the time remaining in each segment. One regular feature, Google Current, sifts popular recent Google searches for trends and oddities.

While Current TV is unquestionably a creature of the Internet age, the Web also could bring about the channel’s ultimate demise. The concept behind the network, harnessing user-provided content, is also at the core of some of the hottest new Internet ventures, such as the youth-oriented social site MySpace and the photo-sharing site Flickr.

Google recently launched its own video service, which allows users to upload videos to the company’s servers and show them to the public for free or for a fee. Apple is distributing content for its video iPods. That could be competition for Current TV, which gathers its videos in a similar fashion and makes some of them available through the Web.

“That niche, which was unique a couple of years ago when Al Gore talked about it first, is not so unique anymore because of the things companies like Google and Yahoo are doing,” a leading industry analyst, Paul Kagan, said. “Google has created the largest video platform in the world.”

One way Current TV could gain access to more viewers quickly is by streaming the network via broadband. At the moment, contracts with cable and satellite providers preclude that. Mr. Hyatt, the channel’s CEO, recently told MediaWeek that deals to reach cell phones, Sony PlayStations, and iPods are in the works.

However, Mr. Kagan said the challenge from the Web is not a death knell. “The Internet is catching up, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a channel like that,” he said. “I personally believe there should be more of the public’s video on TV. I’m amazed it’s taken so many years.”

While there’s no question the number of people who can edit videos at home has skyrocketed, Current TV has discovered that the number who can make interesting or watchable “pods” is substantially smaller. To separate the wheat from the chaff, the network uses a Web based “green-lighting” process through which viewers rate each others’ submissions. Videos that rise to the top are put on air and the contributors are paid a fee that starts at $500.

That process yields only about 30% of what the network needs to fill its days. The channel fills the rest with commercially-produced or “commissioned” segments about social issues, fashion, and music. Current TV also has an in-house, six-person news staff that covers stories of interest to young people.

“With our small, scrappy team, we’re sort of tackling a lot of things that I think are important and newsworthy but aren’t so much being covered by everyone else,” the network’s news director, Laura Ling, said last week at Current TV’s San Francisco headquarters. In recent weeks, the network has sent journalists to explore conditions in Haiti and assess the election in Bolivia. “It’s guerrilla-style reporting,” she said.

Ms. Ling, who is also an on-air reporter, said the network looks for subjects that aren’t being covered by other TV news outlets. It’s not difficult, she said. “You turn on each channel and everyone’s covering the same thing for the same audience,” she said.

An early press release said Mr. Gore would spend “the lion’s share of his time” working on Current TV. At the moment, he visits the firm’s headquarters for a few days each month, staffers said.

The network’s staff is clearly wary about the channel being perceived as political. Mr. Gore is not an on-air presence. According to a question-and-answer posting on the channel’s Web site, it is “absolutely not” a requirement that videos present a Democratic Party viewpoint.

Despite the caveats, on balance the on-air segments do tilt left. Cartoon “pods” mock Mr. Bush and other administration figures. A commissioned video exploring military recruiting in high schools used hidden cameras to capture a uniformed recruiter giving a pitch that was portrayed as misleading. Anti-war “counter-recruitment” activists were featured, but the video showed no young people explaining the benefits of military service.

A “pod” about the violent expulsion of Jewish settlers from the Amona outpost in the West Bank showed Israeli police clubbing and baton charging recalcitrant settlers, but did little to explain why Israel’s government took the action.

Ms. Ling said submissions are vetted for accuracy, but that the network doesn’t try to obscure a contributor’s viewpoint. “Sometimes that voice is not the unbiased voice and we will set it up that way,” she said, adding that opposing views are always solicited on controversial topics.

Asked about the company’s finances, the network spokesman, Mr. Dolan, said, “We’re very happy with our performance.” He declined to say how long the company can go without making a profit. However, court filings reviewed by the Sun put the initial investment at $75 million. Directors include Mr. Hyatt, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for the Senate from Ohio in 1994, and Richard Blum, an investment banker and the husband of Senator Feinstein. Several reliable Democratic donors are also investors.

Mr. Dolan said Messrs. Gore and Hyatt were unavailable for interviews last week.

One investor that has generated controversy is the Yucaipa American Fund. President Clinton is an adviser to the fund, which is backed by California pension money and was described in press accounts as specializing in investments benefiting lower-income urban and rural communities.

A critic of the fund, Peter Schweizer, said he doesn’t believe the network is aiding the underprivileged. “That’s the express goal they established,” Mr. Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, said. “Of course, Current TV doesn’t fit the bill.”

Yucaipa declined to comment for this story, but Mr. Dolan said the network’s headquarters is in an area classified as an “enterprise zone.” He said the firm employs 125 people there and 75 others in places such as Los Angeles and New York. “It’s a very multiethnic diverse staff and our programming reflects that,” he said.

The bulk of Current TV’s potential audience comes from DirecTV, which makes the network available to all 15.1 million American subscribers. DirecTV is controlled by News Corporation, making one key patron of Mr. Gore’s venture the conservative-leaning Rupert Murdoch.

In New York, Time Warner carries the network on channel 103, as part of the $40-a-month basic service. Another challenge for the new channel is that in some cities, such as San Francisco, cable subscribers have to pay an extra fee for the programming tier that includes Current TV.

The network also has hit legal snags relating to its name. The Sun has learned that Current TV is facing a trademark lawsuit brought by Minnesota Public Radio, which uses the phrase “The Current” to describe some of its programming. Mr. Gore’s venture has yet to file a formal response to the suit, which is in its preliminary stages in federal court in St. Paul.

Earlier last year, a Maryland-based company that offers broadband Internet service over power lines, Current Communications Group LLC, sought to block Mr. Gore’s venture from launching, at least under the Current TV name. A federal judge in Ohio rejected the request for an injunction and found little likelihood of confusion or competition between the firms. The lawsuit remains pending.

Mr. Hyatt testified in the Ohio case that he came up with the Current TV name while skiing with his son.