Wesley’s Week (Nov. 6-12, 2006)

by Wesley

Well, I certainly was shocked by the news. No, not about the Democrats regaining control of the House of Representatives, and no, not about Britney Spears dumping K-Ration or whatever his name is after just two years of marriage, though since it lasted longer than two days, I imagine that is an improvement over her previous record. My consternation comes from the recent announcement that Comedy Central wants YouTube to drop all its clips of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report.

As you probably already know, YouTube has the most extensive, amazing array of video bits on the Internet. I have seen on it classic comedy segments from the likes of the legendary Gracie Allen and Ernie Kovacs, homemade music videos, news clips, and portions of rarely seen movies such as The Hollywood Revue of 1929. It is truly amazing what you can find there.

In terms of popularity, though, a lot of viewers like to watch Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert for their cutting satires of current events, and if they usually cannot watch them when they air late in the evening (between 11 p.m. and midnight here on the East Coast), they use YouTube instead. I confess I am one of those people. So why did Comedy Central demand that they be removed, given their popularity?

Well, the answer is obvious – Comedy Central wants people to watch the clips on their Web site instead. The trouble is that Comedy Central forces you to watch a couple of commercials before downloading the clips, and its Web site offers only a limited amount of recent shows to view. YouTube had clips going back to when Craig Kilborn hosted Stewart’s show in the 1990s. On Comedy Central, you are lucky to find anything beyond a month or two back. Some way to treat its viewers, if you ask me.

But I guess we will have to take what we can from Comedy Central, since it owns the rights for the series. I just wish it would allow as much exposure as possible for its two Emmy-nominated programs. They deserve better than what meager availability they have now compared to the hundreds of quality videos YouTube used to have for them. The only hope I have now is that maybe Google will buy Comedy Central too along with YouTube and get them back on the latter Web site. So Sergey Brin and Larry Page, please do me that favor, OK?

Permalink |  Save on del.ico.us

Commenting is closed for this article.