Downloader: Comedy Central's Daily Show and Colbert Report get yanked from Hulu

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Comedy Central's Daily Show and Colbert Report get yanked from Hulu

Everybody loves the idea of Hulu, but a series of disappointing decisions and problems with content providers keep plaguing the service. Hulu is U.S.-only, it's never gotten along well with anyone who wanted to provide a nicer client app for it (check out the Hulu/Boxee saga, which eventually landed in front of Congress), it's not available on major mobile devices because it's stuck with Flash, and now it's losing its Comedy Central shows.

That means no Daily Show and no Colbert Report. Those two news programs are consistently amongst Hulu's most-viewed shows, so losing them is a major blow to the service. In fact, I'd venture to say that there's a not-insignificant demographic that ONLY visits Hulu to see Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's comedic takes on the news. The Hulu team knows it's losing some top-shelf material, here, and the official blog post on the subject says as much.

What the post doesn't say is why Viacom (Comedy Central's corporate parent) decided to remove the shows from Hulu. Mashable says, "It's presumably doing so because the income it receives from the online venture isn't good enough." Maybe Comedy Central will make a bigger profit by forcing viewers to visit thedailyshow.com and colbertnation.com, where the shows will still be available online.