EDIT:
Here is an official response from Comedy Central via the Colbert Nation boards:
On April 28 we restricted access to full episodes of The Colbert Report for several countries outside of the U.S. We did so at the request of the content licensees who control the television broadcast rights to the show in those respective territories.
We want to make it clear that we hear you, the Colbert Report fans. We read your posts and comments on the boards. And given the very reasonable user feedback you’ve posted, we fully appreciate that fans of the show outside of the U.S. want access to full episodes. Regrettably, the nature of international licensing makes that extremely complicated.
Please know that Comedy Central will continue to work with local TV broadcasters around the globe in hopes of granting access to these episodes in your country. In the meantime, you still have access to the rest of Colbertnation.com, including these forums.
Thanks for your understanding.
THE PROBLEMS:
Viacom blocks non-US viewers from ColbertNation.com
This week has been absolutely atrocious for non-American viewers of ‘The Colbert Report’. First, the Viacom web team added a location lock to ColbertNation.com, and now it is blocking an even larger portion of the international Colbert fan base. We know access is no longer available in New Zealand and Australia, but we’re getting reports from Europe that the site is no longer available in countries there either, including Finland. Hulu has been blocked for non-US viewers for years, so that is yet another roadblock to Colbert fans.
FXUK no longer carries ‘The Colbert Report’
Next, UK viewers of ‘The Colbert Report’ noticed that FXUK did not have ‘The Colbert Report’ on next week’s schedule. They were lucky to even know where to look, as the show has shuffled around on the schedule quite a bit since the first of the year. The only source available to verify the status of the show (other than the rather obvious strategy of perusing the listings for next week) is a post on the Digital Spy forums:
As for Colbert, the bad news is our license for it runs out on May 1st, we’ve had it for a year, WE love it, but its just not getting the viewers, and it’s a fairly costly process getting it sent over from the States on a daily basis, its a shame, but thats TV, it’s properly ruined my mornings, it’s the first thing I do usually.
This, fellow Zoners, is the suck.
THE SOLUTIONS:
Disclaimer
We here at No Fact Zone support Viacom and all the money they pay Stephen to do his wonderful show. We strongly encourage watching ads in their entirety while watching embedded and streaming videos from ColbertNation.com and Hulu.com. We also support the purchase of videos and licensed products from the Comedy Central store.
We understand that without a verifiable source of revenue, it is much more difficult to recruit advertisers to online streams, which means that Viacom is supporting online product with no income to pay for it. I get that. I can also understand that somewhere in the background is a beautiful and sexy team of lawyers who smell of roses and cupcakes whose specialty is regional licensing and hopefully not taking down fan blogs who only exist to serve the needs of the fans and Viacom’s product. It makes sense not to support use by non-American viewers who most probably can’t even buy the products that the advertisers sell.
That being said …
There are fans of Colbert who no longer have a way to see Colbert, and as a fellow fan I can totally understand the pain of these international fans.
There are few precious alternatives to watching the ‘Colbert Report’ if you have no standard options. But luckily, there are in fact a few options. Here are the alternatives we know of – feel free to post any others that you know of in the comments, and we’ll add them to this list.
- Option #1: Hotspot Shield VPN
To me, this seems like the most paletable option, as I imagine it still counts on the video view count of ads. Using the Hotspot Shield effectively blocks your IP, and creates a Virtual Private Network for your online viewing experience. In other words, Viacom won’t know you’re not from the US. Using Hotspot shield, you should be able to view both ColbertNation.com and Hulu.com to watch full episodes free of the country restrictions.
To get the Hotspot Shield VPN for your computer, go here: HotspotShield.com
Option #2: BitTorrents
Ah, one of the most profane words on the Internet, at least by people who own the copyright on videos being torrented. These videos are often marginal quality, and from what I understand, take a very long time to download from the servers to your computer. Also, did I mention that big media companies with huge cadres of lawyers hate these things?
I’ve never used them, but from what I understand, they are an indispensable way to watch the ‘Colbert Report’ if you don’t have access to the show on TV or online. Torrents of the show tend to show up within a few hours of broadcast, and virtually every episode ever broadcast can be found if you do enough searching online. However, they generate no revenue for Stephen Colbert or Viacom, and are severely frowned upon by official parties.
That is why we cannot recommend downloading these Torrents, which can be found at sites such as mininova.com and Torrentz.com. While you can find how to download and view torrents all over the Internet, this is a very bad way to get your shows. Seriously, horrible. Don’t do it.
BUT I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING! WHAT CAN I DO?
Unfortunately, once these decisions are made, there’s not a lot more that can be done. However, here are a few addresses you may want to try.
FXUK
I couldn’t find a mailing address for FXUK for you to mail letters, but you can click on the link below to express your dissatisfaction with the decision to not renew the ‘Colbert Report’ broadcasting license.
Comedy Central UK
E-mail Comedy Central UK and ask them to start carrying ‘The Colbert Report’.
- Comedy Central UK
180 Oxford Street
London W1D 1DS
Tel. 020 7478 5300
Click here to e-mail Comedy Central UK
Also, if you’re going to talk about your unhappiness with the situation on Twitter, make sure to use this hashtag – #saveourcolbert – and know that you are not alone in your fight.
h/t ChicaLolita, Daniel D. and multiple other global fans of ‘The Colbert Report’ who simply want their favorite show back
I love this illustration so hard.
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this pic sort of illustrates how i feel on a regular basis. ;)
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And don’t forget we can’t buy it on iTunes either, as it is only sold in the American store. *fume*
Also, this obviously means no more Global Editions from me. Sorry.
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Oh, that REALLY stinks! I’m so sorry.
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I’m so sorry overseas It Getters. That sucks so hard that you’re having such trouble getting your nightly dose of Stephen. I really enjoyed watching the UK intros that used to get posted here too. : (
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Hang on, why not use the system in place with TDS right now, which is streaming with UK-centric ads?
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One could also use http://www.tvunetworks.com, they stream CC programming. I’ve never really used it, but on the old colboards, people recommended it to watch the Colbert Christmas special.
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…unless you have a Mac. When I click on “Watch TV,” I get a screen message that they only approve IE & Firefox browsers in Windows.
But they do have a Beta download for Mac.
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You can also stream it on Ninjavideo (google it). It’s basically like downloading it (because a full sized AVI file that you could find on those torrent sites gets saved TEMPORARILY into your My Videos folder… which you can either move it elsewhere or have it automatically deleted) but you watch it on the web through DivX web player.
Just an option. I, being in Canada, haven’t been blocked from the site yet but those videos have been blocked for me (embedded or not) for ages.
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This is just wrong and miserable for you overseas viewers. I hope you find a way, truthiness must be worldwide!
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I’m crossing my fingers it doesn’t happen to us. :(
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back in the Philippines we can still watch CC videos!? yehey!
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I’m so sorry for all of you overseas! Democracy now! I can’t imagine that it will remain like this forever.
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I must say this is a stupid move!!! why are they blocking access!!
Now, how am i going to watch it?!
Just an update:
After hours of search, I manage to ‘bypass’ and watch the show after getting a UK based vpn . I am surfing and watching video with an UK ip address after connected to my account. From there, I am able to load up video. God blessed!!! If you are interested, check out http://www.smallvpn.com . Great speed and most important thing it is ads-free!!!
Just my 2cent.
-roly
P.S hotshieldspot sux!!! it is so slow and full of ads! YUCKS!!
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…yet just last week i noticed you can download MSNBC shows here in finland thru Itunes, the audios… and videos you can catch from MSNBC site…
i really do not understand how anyone would want to send these programs (Daily / colbert) here in finland, even the weekly edition, so i could not understand why would there be anybody wanting keep his rights and block us finlandaise…
what’s the difference between rachel maddow or daily show, both look through same issues from different sides, blocked one is openly comedic so that must create some kind of larger rights… *(
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If it wasn’t for this site and the weekly recap video being posted on Facebook, I wouldn’t get any dose of Colbert at all now! I haven’t been able to watch videos at the Colbert Nation site for months.
It always seemed odd to me that FX bought the UK rights for TCR when it would’ve made more sense for More4 to want them, so they could show it as a double-header with TDS. That would be great! I guess we can hope for it to happen, though it probably won’t.
Keep up all of the good work – us Colbert fans outside the US are relying on all of your efforts even more now for our fix!
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I agree, I think The Colbert Report would do incredibly well if More4 showed it after TDS, I knew it was never going to get enough attention on FX! I’ll just have to rely on torrents even if it does make me feel like a criminal
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a question on ratings in the UK: is it not rating well?
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I can’t understand how Colbert is not doing well in the UK. They need to show it after TDS, to give the viewers a little bit of context, like hey, one of these things is much like the other.
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I actually just got back today from visiting the UK, and was kind of exhausted trying to find a way to view episodes while I was gone. As far as I could find, Colbertnation, Comedy Central and Hulu were all blocked; the former two told me to visit the FXUK website, which itself has very few videos from various episodes, and definitely not full episodes. Meanwhile, Comedy Central inexplicably allowed me to view Daily Show episodes, which air on a rival network during primetime, not at midnight like Colbert does on FX.
Sorry to all the fans out there who have to put up with this on a regular basis. As a Canadian, I tend to gripe about my native annoying, non-embeddable Comedy Network video site, which forces the entire Comedy Central website to redirect to comedynetwork.ca, even if Comedy Network doesn’t carry the show. But at least we get full episodes.
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I always assumed that the reason we can still view TDS videos in the UK but not Colbert Report ones was because The Daily Show is on a free-to-air channel, whereas FX is only available on subscription packages.
That’s just my supposition, because it makes perfect business sense for Comedy Central to ensure that the rights to their show retain their full value – if everyone had the option of watching online for free, they would find it harder to sell those rights to other territories, and would probably get a lot less money for them. Of course, what means ‘business sense’ for broadcasters is bad for fans who are struggling to be able to watch the show!
It’ll be interesting to see whether Comedy Central are true to their word – surely they would be able to open the site up to UK viewers now that the FX licence has expired, unless they’re trying to sell it to another broadcaster here before they make any decisions. Let’s hope More4 realise what they would miss out on!
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http://www.sonofshun.com
sign up
enjoy your TDS and TCR
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I recommend this site:
http://www.ninjavideo.net/cat/1294
New episodes are usually posted within minutes, and they’re in great quality.
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the thing with hotspot shield. SAVED MY LIFE! i can finally watch it again. so happy!
Thx! NoFactZone.Com
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I watch the Colbert report from outside the US. I’m able to because the video streams themselves are not blocked by geographic location, only the code that loads the streams are.
Go to the site, click to view a full episode (e.g. http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=227417), when you get the message saying you can’t view it, right click and view source, search for “noembed” and in between the opening and closing noembed tags you’ll find a list of each clip that makes up the full episode, along with the videoId= for each of those clips at the end of their URLs. Note them all (227418, 227428, 227429, 227430, 227431, 227432, 227433 for the example above) and you can stick them on the end of this URL http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:STICKONEOFTHECLIPNUMBERSHERE and put that URL into your browser address bar to watch that particular clip. If you want to be able to use full screen mode, embed the code into something like this http://pastebin.com/f4afc8277
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http://www.reddit.com/r/howto/comments/8jwm2/how_to_watch_the_colbert_report_from_outside_the/ describes the method above in more succinct detail.
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Hi y’all.
I sent Channel 4 (UK) an e-mail asking them about the possibility of them buying The Colbert Report. They run The Today Show at 20:30 Monday to Friday. Tuesday to Friday they follow the previous night’s US airing and on a Monday they show the Global Edition. If someone could start a petition and/or send Channel 4 more e-mails about the same thing then over time this could be a very exciting one hour slot on UK TV.
I’m even gonna put it in my list to Santa this year to see if including that big jovial fella can make a telling difference.
Thank you Nation(s).
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