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Last week Comedy Central announced the launch of a new website for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” which features clips from every episode which has aired since 1999. (Is also when Jon Stewart signed on as host) Comedy Central also claims that they will soon add full high quality episodes of every show ever filmed. Viacom, the parent company, made a pretty intelligent move by pulling all their clips off YouTube then launching this site. With this launch, viewers will no longer have to visit YouTube for this content and Viacom will make some big bucks through advertising revenue from their new site. This is also a big win for viewers since the content remains free, is now available in high quality, and is fully organized.
“There continues to be a rabid appetite for Comedy Central programming online,” Erik Flannigan VP Digital Media, Comedy Central. “With thedailyshow.com, we have created an online destination that raises the bar by providing an exhaustive video library for everything ‘Daily Show’.”
In addition to allow users to watching videos, The Daily Show’s website offers sharing the clips on a variety of popular social networking and link-sharing sites such as facebook, digg, and del.icio.us. Bloggers and website owners will also have the ability to easily add the clips to their own page. The content has only been made available due to advertisements and sponsors as expected. As a result users will be required to view an advertisement before they can actually begin watching the requested clip. Despite this, Comedy Central has taken a huge step by launching this site. Although NBC, ABC, and FOX now offer the ability to watch new prime-time shows online, no one (to my knowledge) has made their entire history available for free online. Hopefully larger networks will follow Comedy Central’s lead.
Links: The Daily Show | Comedy Central
