Al Jazeera America premiered to a limited U.S. audience on Tuesday, after it replaced Current TV in the channel line-up of many U.S. cable providers.

Only five of the country’s biggest cable operators carried Current, and one of them — AT&T U-Verse — dropped the channel on Monday before the switch. Al Jazeera America has hired hundreds of U.S.-based journalists and TV production staff, and has been very open about its hopes to win over a skeptical U.S. public.

In a wide-ranging interview with Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this year, the channel’s interim CEO, Ehab Al Shihabi, said he believed that the channel’s journalistic offerings would be something the American public will watch — and pay for.

“I am not entering the landscape of opinionated news. I am not entering the landscape of the infotainment,” he said. “I’m entering a landscape which, in my opinion, doesn’t exist or it exists but not in the level that the American audience deserve. So the idea here is we are entering for a market that consider underserved.”

Al Shihabi also talked about American’s knee-jerk reaction to the cable channel’s name — and the popularity and demand of another all-news channel.

The full interview is online in video form and transcribed.