The Web site of former Vice President Al Gore"s new cable television channel, Current TV, was hampered by long download times after its launch Monday, according to Web site performance monitoring company Keynote Systems Inc.

Viewers probably had trouble accessing Current TV"s home page because a large number of people were trying to access the site at the same time, said Roopak Patel, a senior Internet analyst at Keynote. "There [were] some problematic downloads on that site. Current [TV] basically said there were no problems on that site, and I don"t want to second-guess that -- but it was most likely due to a lot of curiosity and a lot of hits at the same time leading to the slowdown," Patel said.

Testing the site from five major U.S. cities -- including New York and Los Angeles -- Patel said it took Keynote up to 22 seconds to load Current TV"s home page. In some cases, San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote couldn"t download the page at all.

Usually, a page can be downloaded in five seconds or less, he said.

"Today I took measurements from around the country, from Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and things seem to be stable," Patel said. "The download time was below 2 seconds across the board."

Current TV didn"t respond to a request for comment.

Patel said that even though Current TV"s Web site is heavily animated and uses Flash, those features wouldn"t normally affect the sluggishness of downloading the site"s home page.

"I would second [the idea] that the slowdown was most likely related to just the traffic hitting the site," said Patel. "But having said that, Keynote does performance metrics and tracks performance of these pages, and we don"t have an explicit means of tracking traffic. So we can only infer from our data what the likelihood [of increased traffic] is."