25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

What I find really interesting is that all these studios who ran TV channels for so many years fumbled the bag when it came to streaming.. It's like all these people who basically were in content distribution didn't really wise up to the next, new thing in their business even as it happened in front of their eyes.

It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially given that they provide access to top shows that people really want to watch. It's like having Breaking Bad-esque product but really screwing up when it comes to wanting people to watch it.

Given the extent to which the tech behind streaming platforms -- storage, CDNs, tie-ups with telecoms -- have been standardized (and democratized, to some extent) by big players like YouTube and Netflix, you would think that a basic ad supported layer of any of these studio specific platforms would make many multiples of what they actually need to put in to setup a basic platform.

The tech's cheap and they already have the content. Most of the older content would be relatively low traffic -- hell, most of these old topical Comedy Central late night shows barely broke a million views when they were new and I don't think jokes about Saddam Hussein and GW's folksy demeanor would click now. How much would it really cost for any big studio to let people view these archives? Am I missing something big that causes somebody like Paramount to go $14B in debt trying to get people to use their streaming service? Is it a function of the business they're in or is it just a case of LA movie studio types not understanding tech?

Free content removed by previously benevolent publisher.

It's too bad they weren't able to make their free content into a profit stream.

The sad part here is that they were / are a steward to something beloved by many but through copyright they take it as hostage to the grave.

If they no longer find value in distributing it shouldn't they be obligated to waive their ownership?

Maybe copyright itself needs some reform if it grants control over the archaelogical / historical record of our civilization

This is complete incompetence from their leadership who show no value to their own content. They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else but that kind of thinking would be beyond their competency. It's no wonder they go in such huge losses despite of having loyal audience and monopoly over unparalleled content. To this day I cannot get over the fact that there are literally millions documentaries out there made with a lot of love and hard work but only available through DVD or mailing in a check to some dude. Similarly, lot of my favorite music albums are still on cassette tapes and never digitized online by their creators. Fortunately, audience did digitized them nicely and uploaded over to torrents and that's the only way to get them today. Same goes of out of print books and magazines. The producers of this content could have easily digitized it and uploaded over to some marketplace and made at least free coffee money for rest of their lives but surprisingly they just never get around doing it. IMO, it just expresses complete naivety and disregard to importance of their own content. They sure spent days and months of blood and sweat but can't get around to do a last mile of uploading files.

There is a huge startup opportunity here for folks who are willing to chase these content and do the last mile on their behalf.

Could they just have uploaded these to YouTube and monetized there through ads? Might not go with their brand, but better than deleting!

This is what happens when software developers sell the idea of "streaming", i.e., downloading and throwing away, instead of downloading and keeping. Meanwhile the price of offline storage has dropped precipitously as the popularity of expensive "streaming" has risen.

Online storage is relatively expensive but software developers sell the idea of "cloud" storage instead of offline storage. Eventually people want to cut costs. Overpriced "cloud storage" is a likely target.

Why are these ideas pushed on computer users despite contravening common sense. Answer: Greed.

How much could it possibly have been costing them to leave old clips up? I suspect the really old stuff was pretty low traffic, file storage is ridiculously cheap, how much money could this realistically save them?

I'm sure it's not "zero" but I think I'm missing something...is it copyright savings or something?

I remember watching full episodes of South Park on their website. This was around 2000.

Lost media is a real thing, more and more so when the internet loses data we've stored. We think it is a premanent place and sure it might out live us, but nothing is permanent.

They could have saved money by hiring developers who are cheap. Not cheap developers.

My team requested access to a tool in the company, and the finance department said it was too expensive to get an additional license. We fought for 6 months to get that license.

The moment we got access, we saw that everyone was on the high end plan, and not even using it as it was intended. We even saw an account called Sample-test that was costing upwards of $15k a month.

Now we pay $1000 a year.

Paramount+ rushed to get in the game. They even borrowed the plus in their name. Now they need those frugal devs to make it work and help save money.

This really highlights the need for something like a "right to culture". People deserve a way to personally preserve and enjoy the cultural artifacts that are important to them. I can mostly do that by buying digital music, but (as Jon Stewart would say) with TV and movies, ah-not-so-much.

Related:

MTV news website goes dark, archives pulled offline

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40782101

MTV news then this?? Did some older and borderline archaic provider skyrocket their prices?

So wait if I have a copy of a deleted forever by Paramount episode am I a thief or savior?

My morals are confused

Business as usual. Someone decided to earn more money :

  "While episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website, you can watch Comedy Central through your TV provider. You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows."

When a work of art becomes known by the general public for some very short period, like 10 years, it should enter the public domain. That’s plenty of time for creators to profit. Art that has become part of our culture shouldn’t be owned by anyone.

I'm all for archiving all the things. I even hoard some things myself. On the other hand, uncoordinated efforts are so wasteful.

Just burning goodwill like cordwood. I'm starting to believe they don't have a single person on staff who understands customer relations - or even that they have customers in need of pleasing. They seem like a faceless entity with impenetrable goals.

Honestly, I'm still reeling from the cancellation of Tosh.0. It makes zero sense from the outside looking in. It was their second most popular show after "South Park", cost peanuts to make, and had been renewed for another four seasons. They ended up breaking the contract, which presumably cost them nearly as much as just producing the show would have

I suppose stuff like this just reinforces why I download everything I can, even though in this specific case I never had much access to comedycentral anyway since it was typically region locked.

It is clear now that paper archives are far superior to digital ones.

Digital archives don't degrade over time - but they are so easy to destroy. Unplug the disks, or hit "Erase", or take the site down - and history has been erased.

We'll know more about the 19th century than we ever will of the 21st century.

Piracy should be legal if there are no other means of obtaining the content.

Anything else owned by paramount that needs to be urgently archived?

We're going to lose so much more cultural history to corporate greed in the next century. Preservation of music, media, games are all being attacked in the name of profits. Future generations will not be able to enjoy the vast wealth we're creating because folks would rather destroy it than make it available for distribution, even for a fee.

Incredible. Server and compute costs continue to plummet yet keeping an archive around is a financial burden. Sadness.

Torrenting becomes a moral imperative.

Is it possible many companies are killing off their video archives because those archives bring in little income, but may have great value in training AIs, and the companies do not want anyone scraping those video archives?

This is why you download the things you love. Hard drives are cheap.

They got an estimate for the audit on expired copyrights and media use and though "fuck it". Probably going to monetize and re-release cleared highlights at a later date.

At least crate a YouTube channel as a archive and upload the videos there. Will mantain te brand presence, avoid some backlash, and maybe earn some money with ad revenue.

By the time I finish this comment someone else will have pointed it out, but the S and B in 'website' are the wrong way around.

wild to think that the web is old enough now that major media properties are shutting down websites.

CC has a YouTube channel and a FB page. Did they delete content from their as well?

This firms up a moral case for torrents as a distributed archival method.

Everything is available on Usenet. So it's not such a big deal.

Ha! Historical rhymes—film, magnetic tape, and now hard drives?

I guess I gotta be the one to point out the typo in the title.

*website

Yo ho ho...!

The Daily Show, during all those classic Jon Stewart years.

And sure enough, it's gone.

My first try, the classic interview between Jon and Joe Biden in 2015, where Biden admits he unwittingly politically used a story about a family coal miner that didn't exist. Interviews with Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice. Their 2000 and 2004 coverage of the RNC and DNC conventions, all gone.

https://www.cc.com/video/j6f55l/the-daily-show-with-jon-stew... https://www.cc.com/video/kqe9tb/the-daily-show-with-jon-stew...

Yeah, I think I have a feeling about that, but I think really this is just a loss of some of our common story.

someone alert r/DataHoarder this still works for the moment https://www.adultswim.com/videos/

oh wait that is cartoonetwork, nevermind, well actually you never know

The enshitification continues.

don't worry people, you will still be able to ask chatgpt about most videos that were on that website /s