Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

clip show

There was a bit of a to-do earlier this week when Comedy Central asked YouTube to pull thousands of Daily Show and Colbert Report videos from its site. I finally found some clarification today: Comedy Central asked the video sharing service to remove all full episodes from its site — but clips from the shows are still okay. (Stephen Colbert underscored that point on tonight’s show, as the topic of a weirdly disjointed edition of “The Word.” I’m sure the clip will be up on YouTube soon enough. Here’s the video.)

Allowing folks to continue posting their favorite clips from the shows is a smart move: The folks posting the clips in the first place are probably among the shows’ most devoted fans, and having those videos easily accessible (and bloggable) just encourages people to keep watching and talking about them. (Colbert in particular has been pretty canny in engaging his Internet fandom.)

I can’t say the same about Comedy Central’s own video streaming service, Motherload. The cable network has started offering streams of each day’s full episode. Good luck, though, if you’re not using Internet Explorer on a PC; the Motherload video player currently works only on that platform. And, from what I understand, it’s not very link-friendly (not that it’s ever been very easy to directly link to videos on the Comedy Central Web site).

Weirdly enough, today was a fairly big day for other Jon Stewart / Stephen Colbert stories:

• NBC’s Brian Williams told the Philadelphia Inquirer that folks shouldn’t rely on the fake news anchors for election night news. (via TV Squad)
• Stewart and Colbert also are the subjects of an election week Rolling Stone cover story written by Maureen Dowd of The New York Times. (via TV Squad)