No more "Daily Show," "Colbert Report" on Hulu
According to the New York Times, Viacom has decided to pull Comedy Central's "Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" from Hulu.
"The Daily Show" is currently the third most popular show on the site. "TDS" and "Colbert" have been available on the site since mid-2008.
In a blog post, Hulu senior VP Andy Forssell wrote, "The team at Comedy Central have been great partners for us, and our users have been extremely vocal and passionate about how much they love what the Comedy Central folks are doing."
People who want to watch the shows without paying for cable still have an option, though: thedailyshow.com and colbertnation.com -- which are both under Viacom's direct control -- will continue making episodes and clips available for free.
3 comments :
This annoys me to no end. The only reason they are doing this is they're not making enough money to cover their butts, so they're effectively cutting off a large portion of their audience. I enjoyed the convenience of watching The Daily Show on Hulu every morning, but I guess that's out the window. I don't know why I'm so pissed about this; I guess because it makes next to no sense.
(And yes, I know I can watch the shows for free on their respective websites, but I've found thedailyshow.com to have choppier, lower-quality videos. Hulu is a lot more set up to handle the traffic that streams the video thousands of times a day.)
What is so bad about watching the shows on their own websites? I usually watch both of these shows on TV. But If I miss an episode I always watch it on the show's site, not hulu. Same with anything I can think of, like The Office, I watch episodes I miss, on NBC.com
Quality, I guess? I don't mind.
I've actually found that the quality of new episodes on thedailyshow.com and colbertnation.com rivals Hulu's quality. Since the recent site revamps (both of which offer a much more reliable video interface) and both shows' transition to HD, new episodes are crisp and clear.
Hulu, on the other hand, didn't even initially offer the new episodes in their natural widescreen format (they inexplicably cut them down to standard), and even when they finally did, the video was blurry. I'm disappointed that I'll have to go to a different site for episodes of TDS and TCR that I've missed (as opposed to having them in my queue with other shows), but this is no huge loss. Hulu clearly wasn't up to the task of providing quality in this case.
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