'Daily Show,' 'Colbert Report' Cease Streaming Online Due To Viacom vs. DirecTV Battle

[Amerigo Vespucci]

'Daily Show,' 'Colbert Report' Cease Streaming Online Due To Viacom vs. DirecTV Battle

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/12/daily-show-colbert-report-cease-online-streaming-viacom-directv_n_1668989.html



The battle between DirecTV and Viacom has just claimed a big casualty: Online streaming episodes of "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report."

Viacom and DirecTV have been publicly battling over DirecTV's reluctance to pay the fees Viacom demands to carry their 26 channels. On Tuesday evening, the satellite provider dropped all 26 Viacom channels, including Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and MTV, from their lineup.

DirecTV has noted to customers that although they are losing Comedy Central on DirecTV, anyone can easily watch popular shows like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" on the Internet, where videos found on official Comedy Central websites are embeddable so they can be played on other sites (such as The Huffington Post).

But Viacom continued to play hardball. As of Thursday, full episodes of the shows have been removed from the official "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" websites, although individual clips of the episodes are still available.

[yodermon]

1. ..and into the arms of bittorrent they push the people. n/t

[madrchsod]

2. viacom is screwing everyone because direct refuses to raise their rate by 30%

so what about people who have dish network or cable. i guess they are screwed because viacom are big babies.

if direct caves i`ll have to cut back on my programming. so they`ll be losing my 30%.

[pipoman]

4. I've thought about cutting my subscription

back and buying more PPV anyway. I have all of the movie channels, which is a joke, if I want to see 1995 movies played over and over I can buy the DVD off eBay for $.99, and can get the HBO/ShoTime series' off NetFlix...

[pipoman]

3. As a DirecTV subscriber

I place this entirely on Viacom. If Viacom would allow DirecTV to offer their channels individually rather than requiring subscribers to pay for all of them regardless if I watch the channel or not, this would go away. Fuck Viacom. There are plenty of channels to fill the void.

I salute DirecTV for looking out for my wallet, even if their motivation is to retain customers and profits for themselves.