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Viacom Puts the Daily Show Archive Online
tburton writes "Viacom has put the entire eight year run of the Daily Show with John Stewart online. The content is available from the official Daily Show site, and features clip rating, tags, and numerous community features. The whole thing is supported by relatively unobtrusive contextual ads. 'Viacom's decision to post its entire archive--while fighting YouTube in the courts--sets the scene for a battle between the established media players and their high profile entertainment brands against the user generated content sites, most notable YouTube. Also watching closely the Viacom experiment will be the telco IPTV industry which has seen the market place change rapidly as the quality of online video continues to improve, with at least one platform/site, Vimeo, already offering 1280X720 HD quality direct from the browser.'"
One thing this does is solve the problem that people want to share in community something from The Daily Show that they found really funny, but there's no legal way to do it. Now, you can just link to the right clip from your blog, and put your comments, and welcome others.
There may be less need to sue YouTube, because there will be far less reason for anyone to grab a clip and upload it to YouTube in the first place.
It's like the old "common-sense-test" question: if you go into the bathroom and the tub is overflowing, what do you do first? Answer: shut off the water. So they should stop making The Daily Show, and there'd be no problem.
Wait, that wasn't my point at all. This common sense question has nothing to do with the problem. Drat, my analogies never work out!
Because nobody will buy DVDs of old news programs and they know it.
Or do they just consider the Craig Kilborn years to be a completely different show?
I know I consider them to be a completely different show.
Not that I have anything against Craig Kilborn or the show while he hosted it, but Jon really did take the show in a significantly different direction. And I think its a significantly better show as a result.
When I have control of my content, I have control of the costs and benefits. It appears to me they took their copyrighted videos off youtube in order to start up their own service. They'll control the look, feel and ad revenue. That's the big key here. Comedy Central (et al) will get money in return. Maybe not a profit but Google will see little to no profit.
I think it's a good business decision provided they can keep up with the demand.
This is nice and all, but this Flash video crap is stupid. Not only is it not cached properly by web browsers, but people don't watch TV on their tiny computer screens. I watch content via my Apple TV on my gigantic HDTV home theater, I have no interest in sitting at a keyboard waiting for video snippets to load in some Flash video player with a poor user interface.
At least with YouTube I can access the content directly from my Apple TV (not that YouTube has much to offer in their typical 3-second or whatever clips). I suspect if MySpace gets enough video content Apple will eventually add support for that as well. But companies like Viacom and NBC who decide to offer their own site of Flash video are going to find themselves unnecessarily limiting their potential audience. They'd be much smarter to figure out a way to centralize distribution.
I don't do business with Viacom, so as long as I can find episodes ripped to avi or mpeg, "elsewhere" on the Internet, I will watch them that way.
In 2007, personal consumption has become politicized. We have learned that most corporations, given any opportunity to screw their customers, will enthusiastically do so.
So, when I can identify a corporation that is engaged in practices that I find offensive, and I have any small opening to thwart them (even though any effect of my personal actions will be very tiny), I'm going to do it.
Since the laws of our country are increasingly designed exclusively for the benefit of those corporations (especially, it seems, those most offensive) and to enhance their profits, my behavior will almost certainly be illegal to some extent.
So be it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I realize they want to control the content they own and all, but
Stop. Stop right there. No "buts." Quit while your ahead.
Lookit, all the non-creators and non-artists of the world said "We want the professional distributors to provide your work online, and on-demand! If you don't give it to us the way we want it, we'll just make copies of it and distribute it ourselves." And along came Napster, and [finally] Youtube.
So now the creators and distributors (Viacom happens to be both) finally begin to steer their gigantic battleship around and begin to offer some shows on the Net. OF COURSE they're going to use their own site to do so (DUH!). Yet you still find a reason to complain because... why? You've already got Youtube bookmarked and it's too much work to mark a new site?
No, the reason (one of them) is that YouTube had a great leveling effect on video. It was the one site where a professionally produced 30-minute sitcom sat on the shelf next to a webcam vid of a coupla 14-year-olds lip-synching to "Barbie Girl." And this was a source of great satisfaction to the lip-synchers. Now, as more and more of the professional content melts away from YouTube and gets archived on the artists' and distributors' own sites, YouTube reverts to the Major Bowes Amateur Hour status from whence it started, like that Flowers from Algernon guy when the drugs wore off. Meanwhile, the semi-pro artists, not quite ready for Viacom, feeling the great sucking cold draft in the room left by the professional content going bye-bye, begin to glance nervously at the barbie-girlers on their left and the exploding Mentos lunatics on their right, and they begin to bail off to online distribution environs that aren't, um, painted in such primary colors. Youtube begins to garner that odiferous MySpace cachet, other distribution sites erupt to fill the want/need, and a new era of entertainment distribution arises, putting content at the fingertips of anyone with a cellphone or PC, and money in the pockets of the content creators.
Youtube is dying. Long live online video distribution!!