South Park To Be Available Online Free and Legal
garnetlion writes "South Park is coming online, free and legal. My brief research has not indicated if it will use DRM, require some silly Windows-only software or be otherwise substandard. According to a Wired blog article, 'Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got 'really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.'" In this regard South Park joins fellow Comedy Central notable The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, whose archive was made freely available online late last year.
But they literally have the right to copy their own show (that's the meaning of copyright) so how is it illegal for them? And how is DRM free?
Just discovered last week... NBC has the entire season 4 of The Office online, watchable in full screen, with traditional TV-like ads interrupting the shows. Of course, nobody likes ads, but it's worth it to me, at least, and I'm glad to see some of the old-school media companies like NBC FINALLY starting to "get it".
I don't respond to AC's.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/
Works fine with Mozilla, etc. I believe it's flash.
First (Cat) Piss.
Now we'll see which mods have seen s12e03 yet.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Which damn Jew thought of this ?? Kyle, suck my balls !!
I thought that's what www.southparkzone.com was for?
Or was that not legal?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
they killed DRM! You bastards!"
The reporter was said to be cheesing his balls off when filing that report.
The episodes are already online. Not "coming soon", not "to be"... you can see them right now.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
this is totally tits..
I don't think Viacom was really strict about SP being online to begin with. I remember countless websites offering SP episodes for free, many of which were crappy websites, but were around for quite some time. I haven't frequented them in some time but I don't ever recall hearing any outburst from Viacom about SP being made freely available. It is commendable for Matt and Trey to come out and get Viacom to actually put it in writing that it is free online (via their website) but I still don't see any other sites getting hammered b/c of what they do. Another win for freely available content. Now if only they would host Cannibal! The Musical.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
They've been up for a week and a half already. Old news.
Not available in the UK yet. Somebody get the guys over the pond for a while, so they'll be tired of circumventing their own geo-limited service.
How long until the "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" tag makes it.
Remember after the Mohammad cartoon panic, the episode where they were making a big deal that they were going to show Mohammad? The end where they were going to show him was apparently censored by Comedy Central. Is it cut in the online version?
Now if they would only make it FREE on Xbox Live, Playstation Network and Joost ......I loved when I was able to download the free HD episode last year. I wouldnt even mind if they put adds in to support the cost of bandwidth.
~Gabbi
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
it's a flash based web player. there's no drm. same deal with all the new video from mtv networks. flash players, no windows stuff, etc.
* i work for mtv networks doing video syndication, so i'm posting anonymously.
so the USA gets it for free while the other 96% of the globe still has to download it via alternative methods good to see GEOIP is being used to segment the globe just like TV the more things change the more they stay the same
^
http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/notavailable/sorry_CA01.jpg
-Jin
which is shame, but they do say they'll support the UK soon... which I doubt :(
Can watch all eleven seasons of south park at the comedy network's web site: http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/south-park/
nobody posted it already? you guys are slipping.
all the episodes about an hour after they air. rm and avi.. www.mrtwig.net
1. Record on TiVo
2. Transfer to WinXP
3. Edit out commercials with VideoReDo
4. Copy to pyTivo server
5. Profit!!!^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Enjoy any episode of South Park anytime I please
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
If you are in Canada go to comedycentral.com and it will redirect you to thecomedynetwork.ca, there you can watch ALL Comedy Central shows + archive (including all seasons of Southpark) for free.
On Leopard it uses Silverlight, I've been using it for a while for Daily Show/Colbert Report and South Park and have not encountered any ads yet, but each episode is divided into couple of clips which is not a big deal.
So will Microsoft still charge to download episodes on the XBox 360 now? Will they refund everybody who got caught playing red rocket by buying episodes when they can now get them for free?
The very first thing after "garnetlion writes" is that very same "informative" link.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Please do this for Frisky Dingo!
Given the quality of this seasons episodes, perhaps they should be paying the viewers.
...at about 600kb a second.
That's the kind of service the studios should be aiming for if they want people to subscribe to something. It shouls also cost about $0.10 - that's what it would cost me on cable and I don't see why Internet is really much different, BitTorrent means I'm paying the bandwidth fees myself.
When that's set up they might have a chance of getting me to "do the decent thing". Anything else is a ripoff.
No sig today...
Don't even have to register or anything!
No sig today...
I have been watching South Park since the first season aired on Comedy Central. But then I got bored of waiting for a new episode every week, so I waited for a lot of episodes to pile up and then downloaded them off BitTorrent. Next, I found a site called southparkx.net, which offered news on South Park and offered episode downloads.
Their FAQs said that "Matt and Trey do not mind when fans download their episodes off the Internet; they feel that its good when people watch the show no matter how they do it." I felt good when I heard this, not because they legalised what I was doing, but because they made a truly great show and didn't believe in all the evil copyright laws.
Now, when they have offered a service to watch full episodes online, and to make small clips from episodes embeddable, I am a bigger South Park fan than ever.
RutSum.com
UK Gamers cant even download them on Xbl and Psn yet. On XBL theres ~25 movies but thats it.
My God!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Why is it that so many video sites other than youtube don't bother to buffer their video? I'm too cheap for anything faster than 768...
Give it a chance, only 3 episodes have so far been aired, the first two I admit weren't up to their usual par but the third was great, although I expect my friends and most people's reaction to be a resounding "huh?" because they haven't seen Heavy Metal.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Watching movies on cellular phone is pretty stupid. Watching South Park is pretty idiotic too.
Watching Idiot episodes of South Park on a cellular phone's stupid tiny screen, a perfect match.
If you try to watch the newest ones like last night's, then you have to wait a bit due to contracts. So, newest episodes get shown on TV first. Too bad it is not right away.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
That was not cool.
I mean we know how it goes with those Canadians
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I remember watching the original xmas episode when it first came out, had to download that sucker on 56k dial-up. Christ, I feel like my parents talking about 45's. I feel old and it wasn't even that long ago!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I always suspected that Matt and Trey were MrTwig.net users, I guess this confirms it.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
as of today this works on linux I just tried it out on a RHEL5 Machine during my lunch break (only to check functionality not dumb enough to watch it here...) so score more points for comedy central and south park.
to be fair it would be very stupid for them not to because I find a very large number of so called "linux geeks" to be the most consistent consumers of ComCentral stuff among the people that I know. but I'm still happy pleased and impressed.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Hasn't South Park been available online for YEARS. http://www.southparkzone.com/
Blame Canada.
My .torrent of S01-S11 is at 92%. Screw you guys, I'm going home!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
the quality wont be as good as the 170mb-ish .avi files on TPB. Plus I can't access the site seeing as how I am in Canada. Weak.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
I think I'm going to bomb the Arquettes to retaliate.
Well nothing to see if you live in England anyway :(
Surely the studios COULD provide a better service han torrent sites, why do they choose not to?
Thanks for the answer. As you can see from the other discussions, it would appear that they did actually make two versions, and they tried to get Comedy Central to air the uncensored version, but it's not completely certain that the alternate version really exists.
The video quality is decent, certainly viewable on a 24" LCD in full screen from about 1m away. It's about the same quality you get from an STV/XVID/180Mb/22min release so that kind of distribution is, for now, obsoleted. HD quality is nowhere to be seen so that remains a big missing feature.
The commercial breaks are about 4, spread throughout the broadcast and they only contain one, fairly short, ad spot per break. It seems fair enough to me, with the only downside being that if you scroll forward past a point where an ad should be, you first get the ad and then you get to that point in the show. This makes scrolling very annoying. Another problem is the way the ads break in. It seems very very raw with no transition or anything. Strangely, today I got no ads whatsoever. It is to be expected that the ad system will change continuously until it gets unbearably annoying and we'll have to forget the site but for now it's ok.
The real problems are if you are in one of those 3rd world countries (Canada, UK, Australia, etc.) that are banned by the site because of copyright laws and/or other existing contracts. Also, there is a problem with the way the shows become available online. They come online for 7 days from first air date and then they disappear for 21 days and then they get available again, for good. The reason for this strange publishing policy is also rooted in some existing contractual obligations.
I think the way South Park became available online is a significant step towards legal Internet availability of copyright infected content and - for now - it provides a way for any self-respecting fan to honor the show by watching it through the website. At least once :). The releases can still come back in a flash if the ad system becomes "better" or if the website doesn't go HD soon but for now "come on down to southparkstudios.com and see the show online".
Didn't South Park get its start from the leaked Christmas show that they made for some Hollywood folks? It was the leaked video on the internet that MADE this show in the first place. Perhaps Viacom/Parker & Stone realized this, hence the reason why not much has been done to stop online distribution of the videos?
Don't know if anyone has mentioned this but the full episodes are US only. Not that you can't get around that but still...
I got so excited that I wanted to --PISS OUT MY ASS-- jump for joy!
My Slashdot Journal! YAY!
You don't understand, with these web platforms, the user can't fast forward/skip through ads. Its their new way to combat DVR technology. Don't cheer about it until you think about it.
Now, the teeny-tiny problem here is that South Park is not technically "their" show in a legal sense. The copyright will be owned by comedy central. They can't legalise any behaviour, they can only apply to their bosses to do it for them (which obviously they did, rather successfully). Still, the real copyright owners are the ones who have to green-light all those activities involving South Park currently and formerly known as piracy for them to become legal.
They are, of course, not going to do that. They want to maintain control over the whole enterprise and reserve the right to pull down the site should TV viewership/DVD sales spike downwards significantly.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I tested both FF on Fedora 8 and Vista. It runs perfectly in Vista, but there is some non vsynced looking tearing in Linux. Hopefully they'll get that sorted out.
This is good and all, but southparktube beat them to the punch...
Region coding :). You can only watch legally from the US. The rest of the world has still to contend to illegal emthod (look at my SP torrent season 1-11, 25% only....Drat....).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Artists generally don't own the copyright of their works if it's being commercially distributed. RIAA/MPAA propaganda tries to paint the artist as the victim of any copyright infringement, which is not the case. The artist does not have the right to distribute his work. The artist can not give others the right to distribute his work. The artist has no right to watch/listen to his work.
If Parker and Stone download a South Park episode from someone who does not have the right to distribute it, they are as guilty of copyright infringement as anyone else.
If you download a South Park episode from someone without the right to distribute it and you would otherwise have paid for it in some way, the "victim" of your action is the company owning the copyright, not Parker and Stone.
...with inline commercials... like dozens of other shows from major networks. Why is this newsworthy? -C.
well outside the US and UK we dont get squat. no tv shows, no movies. there's a few trailers for games and that's it. consider yourselves privileged
Like we didn't hate them enough already, they came up with "intellectual property". Can't we just set fire to them all?
with the proliferation of online videos which are great - however it feels like I'm back in the 1970's with the lack of closed captions.
Many deaf and hoh feel this way and luckily we are working to deal with this problem.
Would be nice if South Park pioneered the captioning of videos though like Spelling did with his shows in the 80's.
The benefits are enormous and there's no downside.
People refer to them as the aughts, which is pretty accurate and also doesn't sound completely stupid. The problem, however, is that you have to explain yourself to everybody you use the term to. But let's start figuring out the 10's NOW so we aren't still trying to figure it out in 2018.
Tens? Teens? Ones?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Matt and Trey are some of the biggest douches this Earth has spawned, and it comes through in spades in South Park. They're Libertarian nut jobs whose entire ideology centers around "I SHOULD BE ABLE TO OFFEND WHOEVER I WANT", not realizing that sure, legally you can say whatever you feel like, but socially, you'll be rejected and die alone if you go too far like they do. "I WANT TO BE ABLE T MAKE NIGGER JOKES" is hardly a political platform or any kind of lifestyle for an adult.
Hey keineobitchtubersie, because I don't have to follow orders, this reply is directly to you, and not to your alter-geo, Anonymous Coward, who claims not to be you and thinks that she can demand a reply out of me. See, I can chase you all around the site and still not follow orders.
Anyway, let's get to the point. If there are two things in this world you should know, keineoblacktubesteaksucker, know that:
1) I reply because I want to - you reply because you have to, and
2) I have a big dick - you are a big dick.
Now that we have that understood, let's begin ripping apart your alter-ego's post.Now, I've already explained to your stupid ass that I don't care if you think I am Darby or not. Yet, somehow I get this funny feeling that you're still not done with that topic. Here, get a clue: GET OVER IT!! Thank you. I'm glad to see you agree and know how to follow orders. That's a good bitch. Remind me to go to the grocery store and pick up some bitch-treats(R) for you.I think we already covered this. Remember the whole "I don't care if you think I'm Darby . .
Here, let me sum it up for you: You are so totally pwned you don't even realize it. It's kinda sad, really, cuz I can see how much I've got your blood boiling. I guess that's what happens when you know you can't win. But I really wouldn't know, because I've never been in that situation. You see, I'm a winner and you're a loser. Seriously though, you really ought to watch your blood pressure. It's not healthy to carry around so much anger. It puts an undue amount of stress on your heart, and over the long term it can be very damaging to your health. I hear a good relaxation technique is to wave your arms over your head and say "Serenity now. Serenity now". But, if that doesn't work, just remember - if you are going to be angry, keep that anger pointed at me. I'd hate to find out that you redirected it onto boyfriend. But I guess there's no avoiding it, cuz as they say, you hurt the ones you love, the most.
See, you have to reply, because you think you can win. But you can't; I'm smarter than you. So suck it up and try acting like a man. Oh, sorry, I forgot . . . you can't cuz you're a little bi-atch.
That's right, my little Pavlovian bitch. I've got you so well trained that I don't even need to give you orders anymore. You just automatically do what I expect of you when I snap my fingers. You know when to reply as yourself, you know when to reply as your alter ego. Hell, I'm sure you even know when you're expected to keep your mouth shut.
So, c'mon, bitch!!
** Snap!! Snap!! **