When Current hired Mr. Olbermann in early 2011, it was a coup, a “transformational” moment, as the president of Current, David Bohrman, described it later. It was also something of a desperate move. The channel was started in 2005 as a user-generated, Internet-inspired experiment; later, it tried to be a home for documentaries. It lacked a coherent brand or political point of view (despite Mr. Gore’s presence, Current had no overtly liberal programming) or an appreciable audience. Mr. Hyatt was convinced that Mr. Olbermann would bring both with him.

Mr. Olbermann did bring a point of view — Current quickly added like-minded liberal shows at 7 and 9 p.m. — but the scrounging for viewers continues to this day. Although he raised Current’s prime-time viewership from less than 25,000 a night to well over 100,000 a night, the audience for Current isn’t much bigger than one-tenth that of MSNBC’s. And MSNBC’s audience is only about half the size of Fox’s.

The ratings suggest either that progressive talk needs more time to take root — Fox, after all, has had the conservatives Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on its schedule for 16 years — or that there isn’t as big an audience for it as its backers hope.

(The same questions were posed about the progressive radio network Air America before and after it folded in 2010. Lack of distribution was cited as one of the causes for that network’s demise; similarly, supporters of Current have said that it is too hard to find on cable. It’s available in about 60 million homes in the United States.)

In effect, Current is trying to take the next step in a content form that Fox News introduced and that MSNBC imitated. Rather than mixing news and opinion as Fox and MSNBC do, it is only opinion-driven — it has no news correspondents. And rather than producing shows with mixed opinions (see Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, or Bob Beckel on “The Five,” a popular Fox News talk show), Current has only liberals as hosts. Its programming schedule has no pretense of balance.

At MSNBC, a part of NBCUniversal, Mr. Olbermann had averaged about a million viewers each night, the most of any host in its 15-year history. The channel followed him and another host, Chris Matthews, to the left in the years after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.