Paramount axes Comedy Central website, with decades of video clips, in latest cut

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/03/paramount-axes-comedy-central-website-with-decades-of-video-clips-in-latest-cut.html

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Good, can we start streaming Steinfeld and The Office again? Those were the bright spots that made we watch Comedy Central. Pretty please!! :heart: :pray:

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Again? Office is on Peacock, Seinfeld is on Netflix. Or did I miss some sarcasm?

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No, no, Steinfeld. It’s an obscure little show that ran for five episodes in 2004. You’ve probably never heard of it.

(Welcome, @Melissa2, to BoingBoing, and apologies for the snark. It’s what we do.)

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Motivated as they are by pinching pennies and avoiding a hint of liability, today’s barbaric pillagers of archives are much more boring than the ancient ones in Alexandria.

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A case of fortuitous timing:

There was a great bit on The Daily Show about 20 years back, when Stephen Colbert was one of the correspondents, about Colbert outing himself for eating a panda before the bloggers could break the story. He wrapped it by saying “Take that, ColbertKilledAPanda.com!” Within 15 minutes of the episode airing, someone had snagged the domain and pointed it at a capture of the clip.

I was telling a friend about that, and we went to look if the website still existed. It didn’t – it had lapsed back in 2015. We figured out the date of the episode based on some comments online, but the episode wasn’t available to stream, and the clip wasn’t on YouTube. We finally found it on the Comedy Central website, and my friend snagged it, uploaded it to YouTube, registered the domain, and pointed it at the clip, in the interest of preserving a bit of comedy history. A few days later, Paramount took down the Comedy Central archive, so it was a very well-timed rescue.

Here’s just the relevant bit as a Short:

And here’s the whole sketch (well worth watching) in the proper aspect ratio:

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Question Mark What GIF by MOODMAN

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I hope they will continue streaming on Pluto TV? Still there at the moment with the usual Reno 911 and Daria and Drunk History.

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Sigh, that’s too bad. There were so many great moments in the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.

Sadly the only clip I can find of the funniest moment I can remember is potato quality shaky-cam:

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These bastards are coming for Star Trek, sooner rather than later. We ended up with the expanded Trek universe, in part because Desilu productions was one of the production companies that support Roddenberry, and so it ended up in syndication. Where paramount bought out Desilu, they kept on with that, and when they expanded the universe with four new shows, they were all started in Syndication, meaning local outlets could pay to show them. And they were all highly successful (I guess, arguable until Enterprise). Now it’s likely that all the classic Trek will just disappear off streaming. Fortunately, all shows are on DVD, but if you don’t have them… :woman_shrugging:

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… what is the good part :confused:

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ds9-kira-what

Unsure why you’re responding to me, when I didn’t respond to you in this particular comment. It was a general comment aimed at what’s going on with Paramount and how it might impact star trek…

My response that WAS to you, was more confusion on what you meant than anything else… :woman_shrugging:

I was not the one who said something about that. :woman_shrugging:

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Again, even if you have ‘bought’ something, unless it is under your physical control, it can disappear at a whim.

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Come on, there must be a Marion Stokes of Comedy Central and MTV somewhere out there. /s

Really, though, have any clips actually been lost, or just gotten harder to access?

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Apparently, the internet archive has just put up a searchable database for the MTV stuff that got taken off the paramount site… I’m sure they’ll be along to file a copyright violation claim soon enough…

Just because something was on TV or recorded doesn’t mean it’s forever, though. Just look at the early Doctor Who, when the BBC had a policy of wiping tapes. Tons of episodes are just gone now from the first and second doctor. Depending on what formats these are on, and what they’re doing with physical copies, this stuff could be in danger of being lost. :woman_shrugging: This is why we need non-profit, non-corporate archives. Because this is our history and it needs to be preserved.

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