Losing Comedy Central Shows Not Funny to Hulu

Hulu will lose two of its most popular shows at 11:59 p.m. March 9 when Viacom pulls Comedy Central's The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart off the video site, although content from the series will still be available free-of-charge on their respective sites, as well as embeddable and shareable. The main motivation for the move, as reported by TechCrunch: Viacom will have 100 percent control over ad inventory and not be required to share revenue with Hulu. Comedy Central said in a statement, as reported by paidContent: Comedy Central has made The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report available to consumers through Hulu since June 2008. Hulu was one of the many digital distribution partners we've worked with over the past few years to add new outlets for our valuable and powerful content and to help drive the businesses of our partners. We had a great experience with Hulu, and we hope to work with its team again in the future. And Hulu senior vice president of content and distribution Andy Forssell said in a post on the Hulu Blog: Many of you know that TV shows and movies regularly cycle in and out of the Hulu service. When a show is about to cycle out, we try our hardest to ensure that users who have subscribed to the show or have episodes of the show in their queue are notified in plenty of time so that they can catch up before the series sunsets. But typically, we don't recognize these expirations in any larger way than that, as it's a fairly regular occurrence. Today, though, I want to recognize a couple of our favorite shows that are leaving the service for now -- shows that we love so much that we simply can't let them go without a more public and fond farewell. The shows I'm referring to are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as well as a handful of library shows, all from Comedy Central. The team at Comedy Central has been great partners for us, and our users have been extremely vocal and passionate about how much they love what the Comedy Central folks are doing. In the past 21 months, we've had very strong results for both Hulu and Comedy Central, in terms of the views and revenue we've generated, thanks to a couple of key trends. First, more and more of our viewers have voted with their time by making these shows a regular part of their day. And second, we've driven steadily increasing revenue per view as advertisers voted with their budgets to take advantage of innovative ad formats and very strong advertising effectiveness. After a series of discussions with the team at Comedy Central, though, we ultimately were unable to secure the rights to extend these shows for a much longer period of time. So for now, these shows are rotating off the service -- or more specifically, at 11:59 p.m. PST next Tuesday, March 9, these shows will come down from Hulu. We encourage all of you to watch them at TheDailyShow.com and ColbertNation.com, either by going there directly or by searching on Hulu to help you get there. In the meantime, we are continuing to talk to the Comedy Central folks about a number of opportunities. They're a great team and I'm confident that we'll be working with them in multiple ways in the future…so stay tuned and know that we are scouring the earth for more great content for you.

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Losing Comedy Central Shows Not Funny to Hulu

David Cohen

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