WARNING TO ALL YOUTUBE FANS: Comedy Central is bringing the hammer down!
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Reports have been leaking in from all over the Colbertophileosphere that Comedy Central is starting to send out Cease and Desist letters to YouTube subscribers who have posted Colbert Report clips as well as having YouTube yank the clips down. This has happened to multiple people – this is not an isolated event.
The glory days of YouTube are officially over. I knew it would happen, but I never thought it would happen only three months after I started up this web site. (sigh) Now, all is not *totally* lost. Comedy Central does have Motherload. However, one cannot post Motherload clips onto a blog, or bookmark them and save as favorites, or actually play them with any relative ease. But at least it’s something.
There is also another glimmer of hope. Actually two. First, there is a website, KeepVid.com, that allows people to save YouTube clips as .FLV files, and also offers a free FLV file player. The files aren’t too terribly big. The “I Have a Dreamsicle” file below, for example, was only 6.11 MB.
Secondly, if you have Tivo, you can download the Tivo Desktop Manager, and then purchase MyDVD from Sonic ($50 online) and burn all of your favorite episodes onto DVD-R. You can fit quite a few episodes onto one DVD. That’s my next project for my Tivo.
At any rate, for your viewing enjoyment as long as it doesn’t get yanked by the Comedy Central legal department, here’s one of my favorite segments from The Colbert Report – “I have a Dreamsicle!”
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10 Comments
October 27th, 2006 at 11:04 am
I hate them.
>:(.
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October 27th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Oh no, a company is taking control of its copyright rights? And Google isn’t going to let itself be sued because selfish twits believe they own the show? SHOCKER!
Why not put your energy into getting Comedy Central to allow their videos on blogs? Clearly to anybody with half a brain cell, it would be better than putting your eggs in another illegal basket?
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October 27th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
hey guys, if you use firefox as your browser, you can get a little extension installed that you click on a youtube page and it’ll guide you through downloading it to your computer as a *.flv file, then you search flv player on google and download/install that.
i’ve been downloading like crazy since this craziness; i must have my colbert fix!
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October 27th, 2006 at 9:01 pm
You know, I’d happily buy the shows if they would release them on DVD.
Why won’t they?
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October 27th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
Rah, how do we get the extension? What’s it called?
And why won’t Comedy Central just sell the DVDs of Colbert and the Daily Show?
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October 28th, 2006 at 6:23 am
How many DVDs would it take for the number of shows done a year? It would not be cost effective and honestly, how many people really want to watch every show (or even a few) again?
Its time relevant humor mostly.
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October 28th, 2006 at 7:04 am
You do have a valid point, Bob. For most of Television’s history, it was a very disposable resource. You watched it, if you were lucky you caught the truly memorable moments (Lucy at the Chocolate Factory, Live Aid, etc), and then you went on. Now everyone is journal-happy, documenting every move for watching over and over. And, again a valid point, if the show is done well, the humor is very timely and current and may not be as watchable in six months or six years..
That being said, it would be wonderful of a “Best Of” series of TDS and TCR came out about once a year, so that the most memorable moments that people watch over and over (the TDS “Banana” sketch, the recent Starbucks sketch, the Tek Jansen series, the Green Screen challenge, “Tumblesizing”, Gravitas-Off, etc.) could be available in a high-quality format.
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October 28th, 2006 at 9:43 am
For those of us who don’t have access to the shows on tv (and we are legion) it would be very nice to have the option of DVDs.
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October 30th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
[...] Reuters quotes a Viacom source confirming the company did ask YouTube to take down “some” clips as part of “ongoing negotiations on how the companies can work together.” So a negotiating ploy, perhaps? Many Comedy Central videos are still available after Friday’s purge. Meanwhile, a Colbert Report fan site writes: The glory days of YouTube are officially over. I knew it would happen, but I never thought it would happen only three months after I started up this website. (sigh) Now, all is not totally lost. Comedy Central does have Motherload. However, one cannot post Motherload clips onto a blog, or bookmark them and save as favorites, or actually play them with any relative ease. But at least it’s something. [...]
January 14th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
[...] the Great YouTube Purge of 2006? (And YouTube Purge II – Electric Boogaloo)? Well, kids, we’re about to hit YouTube Purge III [...]