Viacom pulling The Daily Show and The Colbert Report off of Hulu
It seems that if a show gets popular on Hulu, that might very well lead to it leaving the site. At least that seems to be what has happened in the case of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
Hulu announced via its corporate blog that both Comedy Central series The Daily Show and The Colbert Report would no longer be available via the service as of next week. The Daily Show, hosted by Jon Stewart, had become the third most popular series on the site.
While Hulu doesn’t dive into the specifics as to why the shows are departing the site, the general rumors seem to be pointing to it being a dispute over money. Hulu typically pays content providers either 50 percent or 70 pecent of ad revenue depending on the popularity of the show. The belief is that Viacom, the company that owns Comedy Central, was no longer happy with this amount due to the popularity of the shows, and was also looking for an up-front payment to continue showing the shows and their associated clips via the site.
Both shows will still be streamed online via their respective websites TheDailyShow.com and ColbertNation.com, which Hulu will help direct you to if you come to the site looking for them after March 9th.
This story is becoming more and more familiar as content producers are looking for increased fees from anyone that distributes their products. Several networks have been getting into fights with cable companies over fees, leading to stations being pulled off of certain providers while new contracts are worked out.
While this won’t be a major blow to Hulu, it does make you wonder what other shows we may see disappearing from the site over time as more companies look for other revenue streams.
Related Posts:
March 3rd, 2010
Sigh…I hope Comedy Central improves their streaming, then…the low quality of their video and streaming was why I switched to Hulu in the first place. Viacom fail.