Beginning today, eight years of episodes of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” are fully accessible on the show’s Web site. Videos of every skit, every joke and every guest are available for free, fully searchable on TheDailyShow.com. According to Comedy Central, 13,000 videos will be stored in the database. In an interview today, MTV’s Erik Flannigan said he doesn’t believe any other television program has opened its archives so freely on the Internet. Now the content can live forever online. While Web sites increasingly offer streaming versions of television shows, “The Daily Show” is unique because the videos have been made fully searchable through a system of tags.


The video archive is part of a larger MTV strategy to create branded Web sites for popular shows. “With a show that’s as deep and rich and such a part of the American zeitgeist as ‘The Daily Show,’ just having it live as a section of ComedyCentral.com doesn’t do it justice,” Mr. Flannigan said. The new site incorporates banner advertisements, video commercials before and after a show excerpt, and advertising messages stripped across the bottom of the screen during the segments. Tivo, Hyundai, and AT&T are launch sponsors for the new site. That’s a really nice move which could be followed by authors of other TV shows, as they get more and more popular not only in BitTorrent community. Getting the older episodes is often a problem with BT, so this new video archive may be extremely useful for many of you.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/


Liam