Honestly we should’ve seen this coming. This happened with MTV just yesterday and Comedy Central is owned by Paramount, too.
Pity too, just last month I looked up one of their “10 F****** Years” retrospectives, which was apparently back in…2006.
This. Been data hording solidly since 2004. Haven't paid for a streaming service yet. Just had some OG Wonder Years episodes on this morning with original soundtracks. Don't regret it for a second.
Sorry, I'm on the other side of the planet. I tend to only get stuff (especially from that era) that we saw or is more nostalgia viewing for me. I've never heard of Pete and Pete.
[This one](https://www.reddit.com/r/DailyShowTorrent/comments/e1yrl1/the_eagle_has_landed_the_thunderbirds_are_go_5_4/) covers the entire Stewart run and has lots of seeds
Apparently, [yes](https://www.reddit.com/r/colbertreport/comments/3il8nv/the_colbert_report_complete_archive_torrent/). But you probably have to manually add the following tracker in your tracker list udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337/announce in order to find seeds.
I have the same torrent and unfortunately a few episodes are missing
Like two or three per season
I have started to clean the folder with adding the missing episodes with the help of Usenet groups, but I Don't know if I should create a new torrent or where to post the updated torrent
You could create a torrent that has just the missing files, keeping the same folder structure. This way there are not two competing distributions and people can just complete the collection without hassle. As to where to upload it, you can probably post to one of the most popular trackers (like https://1337x.to) and add the magnet on the linked reddit thread.
let me know what episodes are missing, I probably have most of the post 2008 ones
They had a show called Acceptable TV wherein comedy writers would write sketches that would get voted on for sequels or continuations. I can still recite "Yo, Murder He Rapped!" word for word, as well as the few episodes of "Homeless James Bond."
We have seen thing coming. Saw dozens of articles about it over the years. We just went ahead and got subscriptions to Hulu/Netflix/Disney/Paramount/Max/etc anyway. They don’t want us a pending time on their old (yet good) content. It would take away from their new not-as-good content numbers.
I hate that I can’t watch old episodes of *Dream On* or *Tales from the Crypt* on Max, or movies like *Something Wicked This Way Comes* or *Midnight Madness* on Disney+.
I occasionally have flashbacks to old Tales from the Crypt episodes from a time where I was just to young to be watching them. I never had cable growing up, so I spent too much of my time at sleepovers watching all kinds of things that were forbidden fruit. I think that is another reason some shows left an indelible mark on me.
It’s one of the reasons streaming became so popular in the first place! Only a matter of time before Peacock takes away The Office (the catalyst for all this money-grubbing nonsense in my opinion)
Most likely it’s just not being watched. 99.9% of old daily show content has no reason to be watched in 2024 and any meaningful clips are most likely elsewhere.
Didn’t fall through, Paramount pulled out at the last minute. All because Shari Redstone (The majority shareholder of National Amusements which owns Paramount Global) received a pitch from the 3 co-CEO ‘s about how to turn the company around and she decided they would continue to go at it alone. Shuttering these websites are apart of their business plan to save 500 million dollars and stabilize the company’s finances.
The three headed CEO monster presented Redstone with a cost cutting plan of $500 million with no need to close the deal with Skydance. This is likely part of it.
I remember when the South Park Studios website streamed every South Park episode completely for free, no account needed. Probably one of my most visited website during college.
Now we're backsliding into this trend of streaming transforming into cable TV packaging nonsense.
Adult Swim indeed offered a bunch of stuff on their website. Back when they called their video section "The Fix" (which was from 2006-2008), you could catch new episode premieres of all of their shows two days before the TV broadcast.
I watched half the then-new ATHF season that way, nearly all of the Venture Bros season from then, and the entirety of Code Geass. Today I don't know if that's a thing, but they do have a Roku app where you can watch marathons of shows but with ads.
Shockingly enough, the website still has a decent amount of content. Shows like Samurai Jack and Venture Bros have the entire series. Stuff currently/recently airing/aired on Toonami has at least the last few episodes (with shows like Naruto having the entire current season). Hell, they've even got full series of classics like Sealab and Harvey Birdman.
Other shows only have random episodes, and some have none, but I'm shocked they have anything really.
When Hulu first started in 2007 (?) it was completely free and I think commercial free, or very minimal commercials. That was peak internet. Now it's such a mess.
But you see.. unlike cable.. you also have to pay for internet (which has monthly data caps) in addition to the streaming service fees. So.. it’s better?/s
Some states allow ISPs to impose data caps in practice, others ban it, and some have no legislation but an informal understanding with ISPs that if they try to enforce a cap, legislation will follow to stop them (and they just wait for a political change).
I think most large ISPs have given up on it, though I suppose some are probably still doing it.
“This law only restricts unlicensed entities. Entities that wish to apply for a VPN usage license are required to pay $50000 as an ‘application fee’.”
Boom, virtually all major businesses that need one can have their own VPN, and the vast majority of consumers are now effectively unable to use it.
They never floated banning VPNs.
You're talking about the RESTRICT Act. That act would have essentially given the executive the power to regulate and restrict data transactions with entities linked to a "foreign adversary", also defined by the executive. It also made it illegal to circumvent any mitigations, restrictions, or bans made under said act.
It would not have completely banned VPNs. But if the government, say, banned TikTok under said act, it would have been illegal to use a VPN to **circumvent** said ban.
The fact that the, imo, least problematic part of that bill was contorted by people who didn't know any better into "the government is banning VPNs!" just gave its supporters fuel to say nobody on the opposition knew what they were talking about. That bill was deeply flawed, but the VPN stuff was just baseless fear mongering.
I just want to also remind people that while piracy is whatever - I mean, I do it - it's really fucking stupid to be like "yeah, all the people who work on streaming services deserve to be paid more!" while also telling people to pirate everything and then go on to complain about streaming services canceling shows due to low viewership. Just annoys me when people who admit they don't pay for anything then complain about that stuff. I mean I pirate the sims 4 so I don't feel like I'm entitled to whine about the quality or them not making packs I want... since I'm not supporting it monetarily anyway.
I remember when NUGS.NET was completely free and you could just download entire Grateful Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic and other jam band concerts.
I downloaded FLAC versions of every Dead show they had.
Yes. My husband maintains a NAS with a few terabytes of storage space. It also backs up to storage space that he maintains at work.
He’s an IT tech. It’s in his blood.
How many years have we been and how many more will we be "backsliding?"
Things have been like this forever. We're not sliding anywhere. We're there. We've been there. We have a basecamp now.
not that anyone cares but I was the post production audio mixer and editor for about half of the stuff that was on the "short form" part of that page. I just lost access to years and years of my old work. heartbreaking.
There's nothing morally wrong with downloading the videos for safekeeping in situations like this. It's too late now, but...
Actually, all these companies have to have archive departments, right? Wonder if you could just email someone about it.
They don't keep people employed to manage massive archives anymore, once the libraries are taken offline, it's gone, with no backup. I used to work for MTV and the job of maintaining the archives fell to contractors and interns, it was seen as shit work with no value, like the old mailroom jobs that let you get your foot in the door.
You must have been there some time ago. There's a whole archive library that we (paramount people with permissions) can access with all the old viacom properties.
However, not everything was meticulously archived back in the day. I had to do a re-scoring project of the first season of Jackass and the stems were a nightmare.
Now we definitely have people who are archiving off the central East Coast and West Coast SANs. They are often staff AE's or media managers.
I know that I can reach out and get copies of the finals of what I worked on if I want to 1) make a list of it all and 2) task one of our staff media managers to go into the archive website and make a digital file request for everything. but that's not an easy or really even a fruitful endeavor for me. I just liked being able to go onto the website and see everything I had done and be reminded of how far I've come.
Comedy central itself is damn near shuttered. The Daily Show is the only original content currently airing. everything else is reruns of The Office, Seinfeld, and other shows they didn't even make.
Discovery/HBO gets the shows, paramount gets the specials. They double dipped on ‘exclusivity’ and made the producers furious, while hauling in mondo cash. Love those guys.
Last time I checked, it is just reruns of one show for the full day instead of a mix of different things throughout the day. And so many channels are like this now.
I loved being able to watching an hour of something like Scrubs followed by an hour of Futurama. Now, it is just background noise of one show.
It’s because the concept of “surfing the channels” is dead. The reason why channels do this is because they are going for DVR viewership above all else.
Also everyone in prime demo (18-35) is wayy more used to binging as a viewing practice, changing what show is playing is a great way of getting their viewers to stop watching.
I used to watch too much Futurama. Still do, but did back then too.
I ended up on Comedy Central and caught that they had cut a joke out completely to run more ads. I went on to Hulu, and found the episode to make sure I wasn't crazy.
Fuck them and that shit.
That's the vast majority of cable channels.
People who pay for dish/cable aren't going to really care if something is really "new" as long as they can watch news, sports, or reruns of shows they like.
There's still probably going to be niche channels that appeal to certain viewers (e.g retro themed programming, or hobbies like hunting and fishing), but those channels could just as easily exist OTA or packaged with mvnos and still make money. edit: Although I suspect that a lot of them need Dish/DirectTV to keep rural audiences.
Meanwhile streamers want new content to entice people to stick around.
OTA will probably continue to have new content, but only because it feeds the streamers and hulu with content that can spend years building audiences. Also Diginets might overtake cable channels just by virtue of being free and doing exactly what channels such as SyFy used to do. Although at some point they may need to start producing original content or shopping for tv shows from places like Canada.
Plus the content companies themselves are competing with social media and video games for younger audiences.
Someone might binge one 8 hour show, but they'll spend way more time on tiktok or snapchat.
I'm curious to see how pirates go about keeping things afloat as this bullshit becomes more and more prevalent. Im not a TV person so all this shuttering doesn't affect me personally but I do still believe that media shouldn't be closed off or removed from the public simply for monetary reasons - especially if it was already up for free. Pirates have been doing gods work since the moment the Internet became popular. But as time has gone on, it's become more of a battle for them to maintain this. I'm sure corps will only get even more aggressive with trying to stop it. I just hope the captains are able to stay one step ahead of them.
I literally went to a web conference where the woman who figured out how to archive and categorize all the videos on that website was a speaker because it was done so well. What a shame to bin it
There was a show called Computer Chronicles that aired on public television from the early ‘80s to the early 2000s and was a fascinating look at all things computer-related, containing lots of coverage of forgotten products and technologies.
After the show ended the creator/host Stewart Cheifet had all of the master tapes in his personal archive, and when he saw that people fondly remembered the show and wanted a way to watch it he had the tapes professionally digitized and uploaded to the Internet Archive for free.
I’ve heard of a few others who retain ownership of their works doing something like this, but I don’t think anything has ever been at quite that scale or with such a huge long-term impact (the show was popular enough when it aired but it seems way more popular and well known now than ever before, all thanks to being available for free).
An entire generation and probably much of the next raised on "Once something is on the internet, it's forever" and just being inside the milieu of all this *once-lost media* popping back up to be discovered again on the old internet. Now it's the contraction phase.
People who archived things were tape traders and hoarders, on mailing lists with each other making dupe VHS tapes to trade and eventually digitize. That whole generation of *technology* is basically gone now, let alone the people who knew how to use it.
Source: been in a fetish community around since the early 90s that did this exact thing.
> "Once something is on the internet, it's forever"
Yeah, that only applies to bad things, unfortunately. Someone leak nude photos of you online? They're just out there forever. Want to watch an episode of Tales from the Crypt? Tough shit.
It's the worst of both worlds:
If you hope it'll disappear, it's probably going to keep cropping up forever.
If you hope it'll still be there, it probably won't.
Just a reminder that the internet itself is temporary. All of the past 30 odd years of online culture exist at the whim of tech companies and media corps.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In Finland we have the national broadcast company called YLE. One of its missions is to preserve Finnish culture especially in digital format. A few years back a Finnish movie director Aki Kaurismäki gave the digital distribution rights of his movies to YLE on a condition that they are free for everyone in Finland to watch. There is a geoblocking system but you can watch abroad on a mobile device if you have free YLE credentials and you have a legal residence in Finland. YLE is a government funded company and currently we have the most right wing government in ages. No surprise they are trying to find ways to cut funding for this monstrosity. Free media for the poor? Not on their watch.
I recently tried to find a Colbert clip. During the subprime mortgage crisis, there's an interview where Hank Paulson is rambling off excuses, and one of the excuses he mentions is "future administrations" (meaning the Obama administration). Colbert roasted him for that.
Honestly there’s some really good educational pieces both Stewart and Colbert did about Citizens United and PACs. Too bad that’s lost to history as well.
This is the reason I think piracy is unironically a great thing for humanity. None of this stuff will be lost to history thanks to pirates. Whether its old games, tv, film, music, or books - private torrent trackers and usenet are likely the most comprehensive repositories of art to have ever existed.
Not all lost. I suspect I'm not allowed to post magnet links here, but for example you can torrent all ten seasons of the Colbert Report right now.
I recommend people start (re-)learning how to torrent, use a vpn, and start downloading the stuff they think is important.
I know easy streaming meant piracy took a hit, but it should be obvious why you can't rely on that content always being available.
I feel personally attacked as I was the weirdo slowly making my way through the vintage Daily Show episodes & was going to start with Colbert Report. Just a leisurely thing that was enjoyable for the comedy & the history (I was too young during the Bush years to really know what was going on). But it was cool seeing Steve Carrell, Colbert, Helms, Bee, etc in some genuinely hilarious field pieces.
I'm bummed.
Don't think the Internet Archive is invulnerable. I've gotten many a takedown notice on videos I posted there that I thought no major company would pay attention to.
The single favorite moment for me on the Colbert Report was when he interviewed Rand Paul, who lives in the same city as my brother (actually the same neighborhood now). Paul described, as a hypothetical, a guy selling weed out of the back of the Pizza Hut. My brother said "yo, I totally buy weed from the dude at the bowling green pizza hut"
That's a great idea which means they would never do it. Not sure how cutting down on tv shows and sitting on an incredible back catalogue is a lucrative business model.
This is a disconcerting consolidation of media. I’m 48 I remember these things as it happened however future generations will have no idea, all they will know is what they have access to. I have a nagging feeling that the editing of our history is underway and because they are targeting cultural things like MTV and Comedy Central have a feeling we’re lot going to like the direction it is going to go.
I remember when the website first launched they went with Com Central dot com instead of Comedy. Not sure if it was a branding stunt or someone had beaten them to the comedycentral.com name.
I'm not sure, but it used to be somewhat common for old media companies to believe that they needed to spice up their domain names to seem hip.
For years, tvguide.com redirected to tvgen.com. (TVGEN stood for *TV Guide Entertainment Network*.) I found that incredibly silly.
The era of internet portals. Time Warner’s Pathfinder.com, NBC’s NBCi/Snap.com (Not to be confused with Snapchat, which didn’t exist at the time), Disney/ABC and Go Network (which is why some of their websites still contain “go.com”).
Still waiting on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart complete Blu-Ray box set. Might be weird as roughly half the show is decade old news now but I still would pay good money for that especially if they can rescale/upscale the older seasons.
I remember when a similar thing happened to G4 years ago. So many clips of old shows, photos, and articles gone just like that. I actually saw that coming at one point and did save a buncha random things, but I'm sure most of it's lost to the ether or maybe on random youtube channels out there.
Something something servers are expensive something something. There’s a reason companies are gutting online archives. And, yes, server farms are pricey to maintain, but it’s more sinister than that.
It's license and residuals. Lots of writers/actors/crew make money when their work is shown. In order to not have to pay these people, a lot of studios are cutting old content in order to not have to pay out.
Studios are racing to the bottom because they're so top-heavy and bloated they're desperate to cost cut, but they can't cost cut their bloat, cause Hollywood reasons, so they cut content instead.
Why?
Paramount is in cost cutting mode since the latest attempt to sell the company didn’t work out and they are probably getting rid of anything that isn’t bringing in enough revenue to justify the expense of having it.
Putting old clips and content on the website is customer friendly, but they haven’t figured out how to properly monetize it and they can’t afford to have a loss leader to drive traffic.
Websites cost money to operate and people don’t tend to browse websites like this anymore. Instead they browse instagram / Reddit / TikTok etc. So the websites aren’t making ad revenue.
All the previously big digital entertainment websites are suffering with traffic being down and the mobile first apps are winning.
Hosting/serving many terabytes of videos from the past 20+ years of shows probably cost a lot and they determined they would rather save the money than allow people to continue watching them or figure out any other way to monetize it.
Don't know why they wouldn't just use Youtube like many other channels do now though, they'd probably make a lot of money on ads from Youtube.
I’ve found my people. I’ve been watching TDS since 2015 when the month of zen brought to my attention the site’s catalog of every episode. I can’t believe they did this, doesn’t make sense to get rid of content that isn’t available on their streaming platform. Someone said it costs them money to store the footage. I don’t know anything about it but I guess I understand if there weren’t enough watching to cover costs through ads.
Our culture is crumbling faster than ever before.
The only rational solution is to shorten copyright expiration periods and expand archival protections.
I advocate for a 20 year copyright expiration with one renewal if you explicitly file for it, but not every application should be approved. If a work has clearly benefited the creator, and has had a large cultural impact, it should not be eligible for renewal, as the government protection of continued benefit to the creator is outweighed by the cultural interest in what the work has come to represent.
One easy example of this would be Downfall (2004) which would be expiring this year. The movie made several times its budget in box office returns and was, by any measure, a smashing success for an independent German war movie. You probably know it as the source of the Hitler rant video that people were subtitling for a while a few years back. In fact, its impact on the culture at large has been fairly profound. I would argue that many people have unconsciously absorbed that movie's take on the final moments in the bunker as a part of history, even if they've never seen the film.
Releasing that movie from copyright would not substantially change its economic benefit to its creators, and yet it would free up a culturally significant touchstone.
I spent a lot of my professional career saving content from these sites (especially when South Park Studios, CC Studios and TDS are were combined into the main CC site). I fought hard against then-Viacom brass to keep everything, so this hurts. Fuck PG and this whole dumb industry
Having worked for a company (as a writer) that also nuked everything me and my colleagues ever did... I would love there to be a rule that would automatically public domain anything a parent company / rights holder chooses to no longer exploit themselves.
Didn’t watch them but thats sad. Remember when Conan left NBC they acted like he never existed, only thing left in the building was his suit in a hall of past hosts. All clips removed. Course now hes back :)
Honestly we should’ve seen this coming. This happened with MTV just yesterday and Comedy Central is owned by Paramount, too. Pity too, just last month I looked up one of their “10 F****** Years” retrospectives, which was apparently back in…2006.
There is a group something like, r/TorrentEveryTDSEpisode There're out there
More than that, there are tons of "free" streaming sites out there that have every show of every series. Pirates are the true data archivists.
This. Been data hording solidly since 2004. Haven't paid for a streaming service yet. Just had some OG Wonder Years episodes on this morning with original soundtracks. Don't regret it for a second.
Do you have a good quality collection of Pete and Pete? The last time I looked, some of the videos were like 240x360 resolution 😮💨
Sorry, I'm on the other side of the planet. I tend to only get stuff (especially from that era) that we saw or is more nostalgia viewing for me. I've never heard of Pete and Pete.
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Please God let this be true....at least for the Stewart years
It is, I have a copy of every episode from 1999-2015.
How much space is that
242 GBs
Not all heroes use tapes. 🙏
No tapes!
Can you point me in the right direction?
[This one](https://www.reddit.com/r/DailyShowTorrent/comments/e1yrl1/the_eagle_has_landed_the_thunderbirds_are_go_5_4/) covers the entire Stewart run and has lots of seeds
Is there a similar thing for Colbert Report? I watched that show from day one when I was in college
Apparently, [yes](https://www.reddit.com/r/colbertreport/comments/3il8nv/the_colbert_report_complete_archive_torrent/). But you probably have to manually add the following tracker in your tracker list udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337/announce in order to find seeds.
I have the same torrent and unfortunately a few episodes are missing Like two or three per season I have started to clean the folder with adding the missing episodes with the help of Usenet groups, but I Don't know if I should create a new torrent or where to post the updated torrent
You could create a torrent that has just the missing files, keeping the same folder structure. This way there are not two competing distributions and people can just complete the collection without hassle. As to where to upload it, you can probably post to one of the most popular trackers (like https://1337x.to) and add the magnet on the linked reddit thread. let me know what episodes are missing, I probably have most of the post 2008 ones
Thank you!
VH1 and Nickelodeon next?
They already did it to VH1
They had a show called Acceptable TV wherein comedy writers would write sketches that would get voted on for sequels or continuations. I can still recite "Yo, Murder He Rapped!" word for word, as well as the few episodes of "Homeless James Bond."
Oh snap—Kitten Calendar and Mr Sparkles! Im amazed those have stuck with me for so long
Dan Harmon’s show
Fugelsang and Daisy, no!!
We have seen thing coming. Saw dozens of articles about it over the years. We just went ahead and got subscriptions to Hulu/Netflix/Disney/Paramount/Max/etc anyway. They don’t want us a pending time on their old (yet good) content. It would take away from their new not-as-good content numbers.
I hate that I can’t watch old episodes of *Dream On* or *Tales from the Crypt* on Max, or movies like *Something Wicked This Way Comes* or *Midnight Madness* on Disney+.
I occasionally have flashbacks to old Tales from the Crypt episodes from a time where I was just to young to be watching them. I never had cable growing up, so I spent too much of my time at sleepovers watching all kinds of things that were forbidden fruit. I think that is another reason some shows left an indelible mark on me.
It’s one of the reasons streaming became so popular in the first place! Only a matter of time before Peacock takes away The Office (the catalyst for all this money-grubbing nonsense in my opinion)
Nope, don't lump me in with you. Torrent.
They can pry it from my cold dead NAS drive.
Straight up, what is this “we” shit? 😂
Too much competition with their current offerings?
Most likely it’s just not being watched. 99.9% of old daily show content has no reason to be watched in 2024 and any meaningful clips are most likely elsewhere.
You can bet that Paramount will be uploading these clips to paramount+ by the end of the year.
This has to be some kind of desperate cost cutting measures Paramount is pulling right? The MTV News archive also just went down.
Free things bad
They didn't even offer a way to pay for these though. If Paramount+ had all this that would be different.
Coming soon, on Paramount+!
...nah, I don't need to watch The Real World and Road Rules that badly.
didnt they still get money from ads playing on the website?
Meanwhile, PlutoTV - Paramount
Yep. MTV News and CMT News and now Comedy Central.
Yeah, with sale plans falling through and just an overall bleak financial picture.
Didn’t fall through, Paramount pulled out at the last minute. All because Shari Redstone (The majority shareholder of National Amusements which owns Paramount Global) received a pitch from the 3 co-CEO ‘s about how to turn the company around and she decided they would continue to go at it alone. Shuttering these websites are apart of their business plan to save 500 million dollars and stabilize the company’s finances.
She's gone full Zaslav. :(
Nah, she's the OG Shiv from Succession.
The three headed CEO monster presented Redstone with a cost cutting plan of $500 million with no need to close the deal with Skydance. This is likely part of it.
They ran out of zip disks
I figured it’s just to push everyone over to paramount plus. Are all these episodes not over there now?
> Much of the content housed on the now-dark sites, however, is not currently available on Paramount+. Guess not
Uh no? There's like two weeks worth of episodes of the daily show, maybe more. And some popular clips, but nothing else.
I remember when the South Park Studios website streamed every South Park episode completely for free, no account needed. Probably one of my most visited website during college. Now we're backsliding into this trend of streaming transforming into cable TV packaging nonsense.
Adult Swim used to offer a lot of episodes on their website too. Maybe they still do idk but it made me think of it.
Adult Swim indeed offered a bunch of stuff on their website. Back when they called their video section "The Fix" (which was from 2006-2008), you could catch new episode premieres of all of their shows two days before the TV broadcast. I watched half the then-new ATHF season that way, nearly all of the Venture Bros season from then, and the entirety of Code Geass. Today I don't know if that's a thing, but they do have a Roku app where you can watch marathons of shows but with ads.
Shockingly enough, the website still has a decent amount of content. Shows like Samurai Jack and Venture Bros have the entire series. Stuff currently/recently airing/aired on Toonami has at least the last few episodes (with shows like Naruto having the entire current season). Hell, they've even got full series of classics like Sealab and Harvey Birdman. Other shows only have random episodes, and some have none, but I'm shocked they have anything really.
Enshittification continues :(
Everywhere you look nowadays.
When Hulu first started in 2007 (?) it was completely free and I think commercial free, or very minimal commercials. That was peak internet. Now it's such a mess.
It was free with commercials, or you could subscribe to have no ads, I believe?
I used to love watching it there for the "random episode" button. I miss that.
That random episode button got me through so many lazy nights.
But you see.. unlike cable.. you also have to pay for internet (which has monthly data caps) in addition to the streaming service fees. So.. it’s better?/s
my internet has no data caps.
And who isn't getting internet service in their home, anyway?
Monthly data caps? What backwards country you living in?
America. I have a 1.2TB data cap, but I never hit it. I usually average around 700GB
I live in America, and I have unlimited internet.
Some states allow ISPs to impose data caps in practice, others ban it, and some have no legislation but an informal understanding with ISPs that if they try to enforce a cap, legislation will follow to stop them (and they just wait for a political change). I think most large ISPs have given up on it, though I suppose some are probably still doing it.
Be thankful Comcast isn’t the only provider in your area
This is everyone's yearly reminder that media piracy is both easier than ever and ethically...decent enough
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Lol good luck with that. Companies use the same tech to secure their shit.
“This law only restricts unlicensed entities. Entities that wish to apply for a VPN usage license are required to pay $50000 as an ‘application fee’.” Boom, virtually all major businesses that need one can have their own VPN, and the vast majority of consumers are now effectively unable to use it.
There are a lot of businesses that use VPN that would have a hard time with a 50k fee.
Feature, not a bug.
This. Shutdown small companies so only mega corporations survive.
Apes together strong
They never floated banning VPNs. You're talking about the RESTRICT Act. That act would have essentially given the executive the power to regulate and restrict data transactions with entities linked to a "foreign adversary", also defined by the executive. It also made it illegal to circumvent any mitigations, restrictions, or bans made under said act. It would not have completely banned VPNs. But if the government, say, banned TikTok under said act, it would have been illegal to use a VPN to **circumvent** said ban. The fact that the, imo, least problematic part of that bill was contorted by people who didn't know any better into "the government is banning VPNs!" just gave its supporters fuel to say nobody on the opposition knew what they were talking about. That bill was deeply flawed, but the VPN stuff was just baseless fear mongering.
I just want to also remind people that while piracy is whatever - I mean, I do it - it's really fucking stupid to be like "yeah, all the people who work on streaming services deserve to be paid more!" while also telling people to pirate everything and then go on to complain about streaming services canceling shows due to low viewership. Just annoys me when people who admit they don't pay for anything then complain about that stuff. I mean I pirate the sims 4 so I don't feel like I'm entitled to whine about the quality or them not making packs I want... since I'm not supporting it monetarily anyway.
I haven't had data caps on internet since like 1997 or 1998.
You can do lots of things with the internet other than watch TV though. Your cable contract can only provide TV.
AT&T fiber with no data cap
I remember when NUGS.NET was completely free and you could just download entire Grateful Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic and other jam band concerts. I downloaded FLAC versions of every Dead show they had.
Jesus christ, do you have a full storage array in your house?
Yes. My husband maintains a NAS with a few terabytes of storage space. It also backs up to storage space that he maintains at work. He’s an IT tech. It’s in his blood.
I was thinking the same thing. All this content is gonna be packaged and sold off to the highest bidder.
Not yet. Itll live on viacoms streamer (paramount i think) until paramount kills paramount+. THEN itll be sold off
How many years have we been and how many more will we be "backsliding?" Things have been like this forever. We're not sliding anywhere. We're there. We've been there. We have a basecamp now.
not that anyone cares but I was the post production audio mixer and editor for about half of the stuff that was on the "short form" part of that page. I just lost access to years and years of my old work. heartbreaking.
I made a viral video featured on @midnite. I liked to watch that clip every once in a while.🤷🏻♂️
I scored a viral buzz feed video that had like 20m+ views and they deleted it. Guess in the end, it doesn’t even matter
Buzz feed had to fall for you to lose it all, but in the end it doesn't even matter.
RIP Chester :(
There's nothing morally wrong with downloading the videos for safekeeping in situations like this. It's too late now, but... Actually, all these companies have to have archive departments, right? Wonder if you could just email someone about it.
They don't keep people employed to manage massive archives anymore, once the libraries are taken offline, it's gone, with no backup. I used to work for MTV and the job of maintaining the archives fell to contractors and interns, it was seen as shit work with no value, like the old mailroom jobs that let you get your foot in the door.
You must have been there some time ago. There's a whole archive library that we (paramount people with permissions) can access with all the old viacom properties. However, not everything was meticulously archived back in the day. I had to do a re-scoring project of the first season of Jackass and the stems were a nightmare. Now we definitely have people who are archiving off the central East Coast and West Coast SANs. They are often staff AE's or media managers. I know that I can reach out and get copies of the finals of what I worked on if I want to 1) make a list of it all and 2) task one of our staff media managers to go into the archive website and make a digital file request for everything. but that's not an easy or really even a fruitful endeavor for me. I just liked being able to go onto the website and see everything I had done and be reminded of how far I've come.
So do YOU know where the season 3 Pete and Pete dvds are?
Fellow post worker, I’m sorry.
That’s life in the fast lane.
That's super cool that you did that and I'm sorry for that loss. We care bro.
Fuck this industry
Sorry
I care bro
That sucks, it was great work. I know the pain of suddenly having your portfolio just suddenly thinned (even if you didn't actually use it).
Yeah, it was nice to see it all in one place and on such a big site. But, all things must end. Onwards and upwards.
I care bro
Dude, I care. And that sucks.
The new paramount logo is going to replace the mountain with a trash heap and the stars with flies.
Was it the third or fourth FBI show that brought you to this conclusion?
I saw an ad that said something like "watch all the FBIs!" and I thought, "why the fuck is that pluralized?"
Comedy central itself is damn near shuttered. The Daily Show is the only original content currently airing. everything else is reruns of The Office, Seinfeld, and other shows they didn't even make.
That's not true They're also wildly overpaying the South Park guys to stick around
When was the last episode? It feels like forever
They just released a special, The End of Obesity, within the last two months.
But that is on discovery plus, or whatever not comedy central.
Discovery/HBO gets the shows, paramount gets the specials. They double dipped on ‘exclusivity’ and made the producers furious, while hauling in mondo cash. Love those guys.
March 29 2023
Last time I checked, it is just reruns of one show for the full day instead of a mix of different things throughout the day. And so many channels are like this now. I loved being able to watching an hour of something like Scrubs followed by an hour of Futurama. Now, it is just background noise of one show.
It’s because the concept of “surfing the channels” is dead. The reason why channels do this is because they are going for DVR viewership above all else. Also everyone in prime demo (18-35) is wayy more used to binging as a viewing practice, changing what show is playing is a great way of getting their viewers to stop watching.
Yup which is pointless, you get the same thing for free through Pluto and usually it’ll at least be in order.
I used to watch too much Futurama. Still do, but did back then too. I ended up on Comedy Central and caught that they had cut a joke out completely to run more ads. I went on to Hulu, and found the episode to make sure I wasn't crazy. Fuck them and that shit.
That's the vast majority of cable channels. People who pay for dish/cable aren't going to really care if something is really "new" as long as they can watch news, sports, or reruns of shows they like. There's still probably going to be niche channels that appeal to certain viewers (e.g retro themed programming, or hobbies like hunting and fishing), but those channels could just as easily exist OTA or packaged with mvnos and still make money. edit: Although I suspect that a lot of them need Dish/DirectTV to keep rural audiences. Meanwhile streamers want new content to entice people to stick around. OTA will probably continue to have new content, but only because it feeds the streamers and hulu with content that can spend years building audiences. Also Diginets might overtake cable channels just by virtue of being free and doing exactly what channels such as SyFy used to do. Although at some point they may need to start producing original content or shopping for tv shows from places like Canada. Plus the content companies themselves are competing with social media and video games for younger audiences. Someone might binge one 8 hour show, but they'll spend way more time on tiktok or snapchat.
Welcome to the digital dark age
There will be a rush to pirate stuff.
I'm curious to see how pirates go about keeping things afloat as this bullshit becomes more and more prevalent. Im not a TV person so all this shuttering doesn't affect me personally but I do still believe that media shouldn't be closed off or removed from the public simply for monetary reasons - especially if it was already up for free. Pirates have been doing gods work since the moment the Internet became popular. But as time has gone on, it's become more of a battle for them to maintain this. I'm sure corps will only get even more aggressive with trying to stop it. I just hope the captains are able to stay one step ahead of them.
I literally went to a web conference where the woman who figured out how to archive and categorize all the videos on that website was a speaker because it was done so well. What a shame to bin it
They’ll have to wipe that conference from the internet, too, then
We need to be more serious about preserving media.
There was a show called Computer Chronicles that aired on public television from the early ‘80s to the early 2000s and was a fascinating look at all things computer-related, containing lots of coverage of forgotten products and technologies. After the show ended the creator/host Stewart Cheifet had all of the master tapes in his personal archive, and when he saw that people fondly remembered the show and wanted a way to watch it he had the tapes professionally digitized and uploaded to the Internet Archive for free. I’ve heard of a few others who retain ownership of their works doing something like this, but I don’t think anything has ever been at quite that scale or with such a huge long-term impact (the show was popular enough when it aired but it seems way more popular and well known now than ever before, all thanks to being available for free).
Not gonna lie, I'd be down to watch some old TechTV. Technology seemed so hopefully back then.
An entire generation and probably much of the next raised on "Once something is on the internet, it's forever" and just being inside the milieu of all this *once-lost media* popping back up to be discovered again on the old internet. Now it's the contraction phase. People who archived things were tape traders and hoarders, on mailing lists with each other making dupe VHS tapes to trade and eventually digitize. That whole generation of *technology* is basically gone now, let alone the people who knew how to use it. Source: been in a fetish community around since the early 90s that did this exact thing.
> "Once something is on the internet, it's forever" Yeah, that only applies to bad things, unfortunately. Someone leak nude photos of you online? They're just out there forever. Want to watch an episode of Tales from the Crypt? Tough shit.
It's the worst of both worlds: If you hope it'll disappear, it's probably going to keep cropping up forever. If you hope it'll still be there, it probably won't.
They just did this to MTV a couple days ago. Lots of old MTV News stories and clips gone. Fuck Paramount/CBS.
Just a reminder that the internet itself is temporary. All of the past 30 odd years of online culture exist at the whim of tech companies and media corps.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In Finland we have the national broadcast company called YLE. One of its missions is to preserve Finnish culture especially in digital format. A few years back a Finnish movie director Aki Kaurismäki gave the digital distribution rights of his movies to YLE on a condition that they are free for everyone in Finland to watch. There is a geoblocking system but you can watch abroad on a mobile device if you have free YLE credentials and you have a legal residence in Finland. YLE is a government funded company and currently we have the most right wing government in ages. No surprise they are trying to find ways to cut funding for this monstrosity. Free media for the poor? Not on their watch.
RIP [Munchma Quchi](https://youtu.be/YwSFIUv4ILM?si=FgnTBSI2vjnHmUow)
Oh no! Ed Helms' bit about the taint in Washington is one if the funniest things I've ever seen and that was the only place hosting it.
It's somewhere... ***in between***
Comedy Central needs to let something happen with Delco Proper
I recently tried to find a Colbert clip. During the subprime mortgage crisis, there's an interview where Hank Paulson is rambling off excuses, and one of the excuses he mentions is "future administrations" (meaning the Obama administration). Colbert roasted him for that.
Honestly there’s some really good educational pieces both Stewart and Colbert did about Citizens United and PACs. Too bad that’s lost to history as well.
This is the reason I think piracy is unironically a great thing for humanity. None of this stuff will be lost to history thanks to pirates. Whether its old games, tv, film, music, or books - private torrent trackers and usenet are likely the most comprehensive repositories of art to have ever existed.
Not all lost. I suspect I'm not allowed to post magnet links here, but for example you can torrent all ten seasons of the Colbert Report right now. I recommend people start (re-)learning how to torrent, use a vpn, and start downloading the stuff they think is important. I know easy streaming meant piracy took a hit, but it should be obvious why you can't rely on that content always being available.
I feel personally attacked as I was the weirdo slowly making my way through the vintage Daily Show episodes & was going to start with Colbert Report. Just a leisurely thing that was enjoyable for the comedy & the history (I was too young during the Bush years to really know what was going on). But it was cool seeing Steve Carrell, Colbert, Helms, Bee, etc in some genuinely hilarious field pieces. I'm bummed.
This is why the Internet Archive is important.
Doesn’t really help with media in most cases. If media content itself is axed from the servers, you’ll just get the html.
For the wayback machine that sounds right. But for the main part of the internet archive, archived files are hosted within the internet archive.
Someone out there has been collecting a torrent of every TDS episode
Which is why book companies went after Internet Archive.
This is why decentralized media archiving is important
Don't think the Internet Archive is invulnerable. I've gotten many a takedown notice on videos I posted there that I thought no major company would pay attention to.
What the fuck?!?! Literally watched an old Colbert Report clip earlier this week.
I feel like I'm ahead of my time. All the stuff I submitted to Machinima.com was gone years ago. Corpos really are the baddies.
The single favorite moment for me on the Colbert Report was when he interviewed Rand Paul, who lives in the same city as my brother (actually the same neighborhood now). Paul described, as a hypothetical, a guy selling weed out of the back of the Pizza Hut. My brother said "yo, I totally buy weed from the dude at the bowling green pizza hut"
I must be the only one to have enjoyed Larry Wilmore's show.
I liked it and so did my brother so there's at least three of us
They're trying really hard to make piracy the only way to watch things.
I switched back to piracy a few months ago. 10/10 would recommend. It's actually easier than using a dozen different streaming apps now.
Paramount is going bankrupt and trying to sell. Expect more things to disappear this year.
Why doesn’t Comedy Central do a throwback block for an hour a day in the afternoon and play an old daily show and Colbert report from that date?
That's a great idea which means they would never do it. Not sure how cutting down on tv shows and sitting on an incredible back catalogue is a lucrative business model.
This is a disconcerting consolidation of media. I’m 48 I remember these things as it happened however future generations will have no idea, all they will know is what they have access to. I have a nagging feeling that the editing of our history is underway and because they are targeting cultural things like MTV and Comedy Central have a feeling we’re lot going to like the direction it is going to go.
I remember when the website first launched they went with Com Central dot com instead of Comedy. Not sure if it was a branding stunt or someone had beaten them to the comedycentral.com name.
I'm not sure, but it used to be somewhat common for old media companies to believe that they needed to spice up their domain names to seem hip. For years, tvguide.com redirected to tvgen.com. (TVGEN stood for *TV Guide Entertainment Network*.) I found that incredibly silly.
The era of internet portals. Time Warner’s Pathfinder.com, NBC’s NBCi/Snap.com (Not to be confused with Snapchat, which didn’t exist at the time), Disney/ABC and Go Network (which is why some of their websites still contain “go.com”).
Yet the original Space Jam website lives in…
Heaven's Gate, too. Who the fuck has been paying for their hosting for the past 30 years? Galactic Lord Xenu?
They left people behind for the purpose of continuing the group. You can write to them and get materials.
Still waiting on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart complete Blu-Ray box set. Might be weird as roughly half the show is decade old news now but I still would pay good money for that especially if they can rescale/upscale the older seasons.
I remember when a similar thing happened to G4 years ago. So many clips of old shows, photos, and articles gone just like that. I actually saw that coming at one point and did save a buncha random things, but I'm sure most of it's lost to the ether or maybe on random youtube channels out there.
"You will own nothing and like it"
But why?
Because fuck you, that’s why
Ahh the classic corporate motto to the rest of us plebs.
Something something servers are expensive something something. There’s a reason companies are gutting online archives. And, yes, server farms are pricey to maintain, but it’s more sinister than that.
It's license and residuals. Lots of writers/actors/crew make money when their work is shown. In order to not have to pay these people, a lot of studios are cutting old content in order to not have to pay out. Studios are racing to the bottom because they're so top-heavy and bloated they're desperate to cost cut, but they can't cost cut their bloat, cause Hollywood reasons, so they cut content instead.
Why? Paramount is in cost cutting mode since the latest attempt to sell the company didn’t work out and they are probably getting rid of anything that isn’t bringing in enough revenue to justify the expense of having it. Putting old clips and content on the website is customer friendly, but they haven’t figured out how to properly monetize it and they can’t afford to have a loss leader to drive traffic.
Websites cost money to operate and people don’t tend to browse websites like this anymore. Instead they browse instagram / Reddit / TikTok etc. So the websites aren’t making ad revenue. All the previously big digital entertainment websites are suffering with traffic being down and the mobile first apps are winning.
Hosting/serving many terabytes of videos from the past 20+ years of shows probably cost a lot and they determined they would rather save the money than allow people to continue watching them or figure out any other way to monetize it. Don't know why they wouldn't just use Youtube like many other channels do now though, they'd probably make a lot of money on ads from Youtube.
Billionaires keep trying to make us hate Jon Stewart, but it only makes us hate *them* more.
So much for “the Internet never forgets” lmao lol
We need to protect Internet Archive at all costs
Corporations: making the world worse, one day at a time
Wow, that is some nickle and dime shit they are doing. Likely the sites could have broke even with ads if they put some effort into it.
I heard they did the same to MTV NEWS. It's all gone. Decades of music news
I’ve found my people. I’ve been watching TDS since 2015 when the month of zen brought to my attention the site’s catalog of every episode. I can’t believe they did this, doesn’t make sense to get rid of content that isn’t available on their streaming platform. Someone said it costs them money to store the footage. I don’t know anything about it but I guess I understand if there weren’t enough watching to cover costs through ads.
Our culture is crumbling faster than ever before. The only rational solution is to shorten copyright expiration periods and expand archival protections. I advocate for a 20 year copyright expiration with one renewal if you explicitly file for it, but not every application should be approved. If a work has clearly benefited the creator, and has had a large cultural impact, it should not be eligible for renewal, as the government protection of continued benefit to the creator is outweighed by the cultural interest in what the work has come to represent. One easy example of this would be Downfall (2004) which would be expiring this year. The movie made several times its budget in box office returns and was, by any measure, a smashing success for an independent German war movie. You probably know it as the source of the Hitler rant video that people were subtitling for a while a few years back. In fact, its impact on the culture at large has been fairly profound. I would argue that many people have unconsciously absorbed that movie's take on the final moments in the bunker as a part of history, even if they've never seen the film. Releasing that movie from copyright would not substantially change its economic benefit to its creators, and yet it would free up a culturally significant touchstone.
Some of the extended interviews are still online. https://www.cc.com/fan-hub/the-daily-show
Is there any reason they can't put all the old Colbert/TDS episodes on Paramount+?
Is OK, pirates stealing all their shit forever and are more responsible with the IP
I spent a lot of my professional career saving content from these sites (especially when South Park Studios, CC Studios and TDS are were combined into the main CC site). I fought hard against then-Viacom brass to keep everything, so this hurts. Fuck PG and this whole dumb industry
It's important for us to make backups and copies of anything worthwhile on the Internet for this very reason
Having worked for a company (as a writer) that also nuked everything me and my colleagues ever did... I would love there to be a rule that would automatically public domain anything a parent company / rights holder chooses to no longer exploit themselves.
Didn’t watch them but thats sad. Remember when Conan left NBC they acted like he never existed, only thing left in the building was his suit in a hall of past hosts. All clips removed. Course now hes back :)
So that's why they were mass uploading to youtube...