Viacom offering Daily Show clips online
October 18, 2007
In the ongoing quest to make Internet popularity pay, Viacom’s Comedy Central channel today will unveil a website for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” that’s designed to satisfy the most avid fans of the mock-news show with oceans of free video clips.
Rather than providing just a sampling of the program’s fare, as Viacom and other TV networks have done for years, Comedy Central is offering the works: about 13,000 video clips representing every minute of the show since its 1999 inception.
Today’s launch is a competitive response to YouTube. Google Inc.’s hit video-sharing site stirred Viacom’s ire — and a $1-billion copyright-infringement suit — by allegedly allowing users to post clips of “The Daily Show,” “South Park,” “The Colbert Report” and other popular Viacom shows without permission or compensation.
Using new software, YouTube said, it can then automatically remove clips as users post them.
A particular challenge for Comedy Central was designing ads for the site that would satisfy advertisers without turning off viewers, said Erik Flannigan, executive vice president for digital media at MTV Networks, the Viacom unit that includes Comedy Central.
Source: LATimes
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