Koppel, who recently joined cable television's Discovery Channel, said he and longtime producing partner Tom Bettag had lunch with an Al Jazeera executive, but it "didn't take long for us to decide that that's not what we were going to do.
"I don't think Tom and I entertained it more more than 38 seconds," the former "Nightline" anchor said at an annual winter gathering of TV critics in Pasadena.
That's about 36 seconds longer than necessary Ted.