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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
they killed DRM! You bastards!"
The episodes are already online. Not "coming soon", not "to be"... you can see them right now.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
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
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?
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.
My thoughts exactly. I have been (legally) downloading South Park from the web for some months now.
I've seen slashdot publishing old news many times, but this is the first time (I can recall) that I see it posting old news that I had read about in a "normal" newspaper.
I knew they'd blame this on Canada!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Go here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml. Slide the slider to a date to get the Episode Number that aired on that date. Type that Episode Number in the Search box. The episode will be there in clips. For example, I went there: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml, slid the slider to March 20, 2008. The first clip in the results showed it was Episode 13039. I then typed "13039" (no quotes) in the Search box. Voila! 5 clips were displayed. I added up all of the running times, and it was 18 minutes, 59 seconds, which seems to me to be about right for a 30-minute show (shy of commercials and non-informational transitions).
It's not the 1/2-hour unbroken stream you want, but it's there.
-- Dedicated Cthulhu cultist since 1982 A.C.E.
The very first thing after "garnetlion writes" is that very same "informative" link.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
...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...
If you're paying for high res South Park, I have a nice, shiny bridge to sell you
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
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
Strange, it works ok in Latvia. Maybe they hate British in life as much as in series?
This is legal, South Park Zone isn't.
And that's a problem with the entire intellectual property battle. Batting an old woman over the head and taking her purse is clearly, to anyone with a conscience, illegal and wrong. Clicking a link on South Park Zone doesn't look or feel or act any different than clicking a link on Comedy Central Zone, so how is the average person supposed to come to the decision that it's "wrong"?
It's like the old question about how someone is supposed to instinctively know copying a Music CD is illegal when the same company that makes the Music CD also makes and sells blank CDs for copying?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Right, instead of really saying "it's free - here it is!" they still have to impose some stupid rules. Stop creating virtual boundaries!! To me it goes against everything the internet stands for (*drama*)