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25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite (latenighter.com)
448 points by anigbrowl 18 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 339 comments



I'm all for archiving all the things. I even hoard some things myself. On the other hand, uncoordinated efforts are so wasteful.


Given the legal environment, uncoordinated efforts may actually be more resilient, than wasteful.


Just burning goodwill like cordwood. I'm starting to believe they don't have a single person on staff who understands customer relations - or even that they have customers in need of pleasing. They seem like a faceless entity with impenetrable goals.

Honestly, I'm still reeling from the cancellation of Tosh.0. It makes zero sense from the outside looking in. It was their second most popular show after "South Park", cost peanuts to make, and had been renewed for another four seasons. They ended up breaking the contract, which presumably cost them nearly as much as just producing the show would have


I suppose stuff like this just reinforces why I download everything I can, even though in this specific case I never had much access to comedycentral anyway since it was typically region locked.


It is clear now that paper archives are far superior to digital ones.

Digital archives don't degrade over time - but they are so easy to destroy. Unplug the disks, or hit "Erase", or take the site down - and history has been erased.

We'll know more about the 19th century than we ever will of the 21st century.


> We'll know more about the 19th century than we ever will of the 21st century.

With digitization, we're losing a lot of documents from before 20th century as well, thanks to people who figure that digital scans are cheaper to keep than the paper originals, or worse, who also think someone else already digitized them (they didn't, because they also thought the same).


> Digital archives don't degrade over time

They certainly do. File formats become obsolete, the drives can accumulate errors, when copying the files from an old drive to a new one, some files may get forgotten about, someone loses some metadata, etc.

https://www.getty.edu/news/preventing-digital-decay/


Piracy should be legal if there are no other means of obtaining the content.


In other words: piracy is illegal because it hurts the content producer (they don't get any money). But if there's no way to pay for that content, no damage is done, hence piracy and "copyright violation" should be 100% legal.


Anything else owned by paramount that needs to be urgently archived?


Anything they own. They (and most other big Hollywood studios) are in deep shit and will probably shut down if there is no miracle.


> will probably shut down if there is no miracle

Someone will buy their IP and back catalogue in a bankruptcy. Those will retain value and even highly speculative properties might be worth owning just in case if the price is right.


Probably Disney too if antitrust didn't get in the way. I'm pretty sure I don't want them meddling with Star Trek, but that may be the only way it stays in existence.


They might buy up their shows, but there's no certainty that they'll release them or that they'll release them uncensored/unedited.


We're going to lose so much more cultural history to corporate greed in the next century. Preservation of music, media, games are all being attacked in the name of profits. Future generations will not be able to enjoy the vast wealth we're creating because folks would rather destroy it than make it available for distribution, even for a fee.


You're overestimating how much people will care. When was the last time you listened to Bing Crosby other than White Christmas?


To an extent that's the fundamental issue driving these changes. It becomes increasingly difficult to monetize old material for lack of demand. Should lack of attention from society be enough reason to throw old media into the trash permanently? I don't believe so. We owe it to future generations to preserve what we can.


Incredible. Server and compute costs continue to plummet yet keeping an archive around is a financial burden. Sadness.


Torrenting becomes a moral imperative.


In at least a decade, torrents will be down as saviours of digital content.


Already are.


Always has been.


[flagged]



Oh I'm a self-admitted thief yes


Do you also think Adblock is piracy?


It's not 'piracy', but it is theft of a different nature in that you're indirectly reducing the revenue that would have been received by the content creator.


Blocking crypto miners reduces revenue too. It's all malware (in fact crypto miners are obviously less malicious) and blocking it shouldn't be given a second thought.


We're talking about ads keep up


Right, and adware/spyware (which are in practice the same thing) is malware, and is objectively more harmful than surreptitious crypto miners. One just wastes energy. The other wastes energy, spies on you, and attempts to use the information it gathers on you to exploit your psychology and turn you into more of a consumer, or in some cases just outright run scams on you. Background crypto miners are a far more honest and direct payment mechanism.


It’s a theft because I don’t want to watch 40 seconds of unskippable ads every time I open same video in succession on YouTube or whenever I rewind? Seriously?

Provide fair conditions and people won’t pirate.


Rewind too far? Ads.

Skip forward too far? More ads.

Pause too long and then resume? Even more ads.

Watch 30 seconds of ads, then a few minutes of video? Oh wow, more ads!

Accidentally leave the YouTube app then reload it? You guessed it, more ads!

Turn off your TV while a video is playing then you turn it back on the next day? New ads are instantly loaded up and are playing before the screen turns on all the way.

Block channels, creators, or content you dislike in an effort to tailor a video feed to your preferences? Too bad. You’ll still receive content the system knows you dislike because those creators manage to push ads onto their viewers more often.

Pay for a YouTube subscription to block ads? That service gets cancelled, and your only option is to sign up for a new service that costs more and includes features you don’t want and won’t use.

On top of all that, your viewing habits, likes, dislikes, and a mountain of other private information are collected and sold to random entities.

Use Adblock? You're a no-good, dirty, rotten pirate! How dare you steal the food from poor little Google’s mouth?


Obviously...You use a service, which costs money to run/build/produce, and the way that service is paid for is by advertisement. Your decision that the advertisement is annoying or intrusive isn't what makes your circumvention of it piracy or not, it is your violation of the terms according to which you're being given access to the content.

I find it interesting that I have yet to meet a single person advocating for ad blockers on YouTube who, upon being given the option to have an ad-free experience by paying for YouTube premium, choose to do so. Yet they often then immediately fall back on the tired arguments that "well if the ads weren't so intrusive I wouldn't use an ad blocker."


> YouTube who, upon being given the option to have an ad-free experience by paying for YouTube premium, choose to do so.

That’s not interesting because it’s a false dichotomy.

If someone watches youtube and premium costs 5% of their monthly income, it will not be a shocker when they choose to block instead.

Similarly, people who view it as a shakedown for payment with the alternative being visual and audio harassment are not going to bend the knee easily.

I lost all respect for youtube when I saw that my dad is subject to a minimum of 60 seconds of political attack ads every 5-10 minutes that can’t be skipped. Literal political propaganda 10 times an hour. Fuck them.


My argument against paying for YouTube is that it feels like rewarding their shitty ad behavior, while also requiring me to use an account that allows them to track me and continue selling my data. If I had any faith in Google not being evil, I'd be happily paying for rather a lot of Google services...


There used to be a YouTube subscription called Premium Lite which was just ad-free YouTube. I happily paid for that until they shut it down and tried to force the much bigger subscription on me (nothing else in premium is relevant to me).

Now I use smarttube which is not only ad-free but also has tons of nice features which YouTube will never deliver. However, should premium lite comeback I would pay for it but keep using smarttube.


Let me tell you the story of how youtube terminated my youtube premium account for community violations, despite the account only being used to view videos, no uploads, no comment, no community interactions of any kind. How a banned account removes access to subscription page so I literally could not unsubscribe to premium, and went through months of fruitless appeal process that was met with automated denial until I was forced to cancel my credit card after being charged 100+ because you're only allowed appeal every 90 days and I didn't want to lose a 10+ year old account. Or how I had paid Google One sub, which was suppose to offer me in person service, only for them to say they have no interaction with the Youtube team. Then I had to do a Take Out to back up all my data on the off chance that Google would ax all my other services for cancelling card. No one should be paying for a service where they can't talk to a real person to get problems resolved. Google still owns me 10 months of red sub.


If I think some material is worth money I can seek out the 'creators' and pay them directly.

Alphabet could stop being a bunch of criminal enterprises, begin respecting data protection rights for example, and then they'd have a case in claiming that paying them for something might be reasonable.


> I find it interesting that I have yet to meet a single person advocating for ad blockers on YouTube who, upon being given the option to have an ad-free experience by paying for YouTube premium, choose to do so.

That’s because service is a complete crap, pal. These days I’m staying solely for content released in 2015 and earlier.

Why would I in the right mind support this ADHD driven, rage bait filled dump that exists solely to squeeze money out of every occasion? Modern shite is disproportionally skewed towards digital garbage because it generates more engagement and i’m the one supposed to subsidize that?


if you think that nothing interesting or useful was posted on youtube in the last 9 years then i really wonder in what corners of the platform you're roaming around :D


I didn’t say that there’s no new quality content. It’s just platform optimized now for crapware. Just look at the top videos and YouTube shorts, cesspool.


Wouldn't that be a bunch of the people paying for YouTube premium?

Half the reason I pay for it is just because it is easier than trying to mess with ad blocking. (The other half is that it's nice to have download on every device in the native app).


>> and the way that service is paid for is by advertisement.

If by advertisement you mean the whole sale consumption and tracking of all your personal behaviors to aggregators that have arbitraged advertising for their profit and pushed everything in a race to the bottom...

Then yes.

Most people don't object to ads, and less to smart ones... we hate pop ups, the tracking, the scams, the bullshit. Advertising on line has done everything in its power to devalue its product as much as possible and operate an ineffective volume business. Its been doing this since the Netflix pop under and the sign up for 10 services to get a free iPod days.

> ad-free experience by paying for YouTube premium

How many paid for services now have ad's to? Sorry but no one is buying into this bullshit any more.


What’s the alternative?


You don't have something anymore if a thief gets it.

Nothing gets lost here. There is even more of it afterward.

So please...spare us that sad tactic.


Spare you the sad tactic of disagreeing with you instead of just assuming your conclusion?


Sorry but this pointless semantic argument has been thoroughly debunked. A tangible object is not required for it to be considered theft in anything other than very specific legal contexts. That's why we talk about musicians 'stealing' riffs or chord progressions. That's why artists accuse AI of 'stealing' their digital artwork. That's why comedians complain about other comedians 'stealing' their jokes.


It hasn’t been debunked. It’s still not theft despite artists using the “you stole my idea” colloquialism.

It’s non-rivalrous and a massive portion of the world does not see it as bad at all to copy ideas (see China), let alone anything on par with property theft.


It basically destroyed western industry, as designing anything is a lottery with very poor odds.


"We" do not talk about musicians stealing chord progressions, at least I do not. There is (in western diatonic music) a quite limited number of chord progressions (that sound "good"/"acceptable" to ears used to this kind of music) Should new music be prohibited from being created once they've been used? Should painters not be allowed to use a certain combination of colors anymore because another artist already used them? As a (studied but now hobby) musician, I think that is utter nonsense, excuse my french...


What an absolutely pedantic nitpick. Substitute 'riff' for chord progression then


“Stealing” a joke is not the same as stealing a TV.


Is it possible many companies are killing off their video archives because those archives bring in little income, but may have great value in training AIs, and the companies do not want anyone scraping those video archives?


This is why you download the things you love. Hard drives are cheap.


A hard drive sitting on a shelf is a big question mark. Will it spin-up? Who knows?!

So you deal with this by having a backup. Now you have 2x the cost.

But, unfortunately, you could have two hard drives not spin up. You consider an additional backup, but at this point you're at 3x the cost, so you start to reconsider letting hard drives sit on shelves.

Now you're in RAID country. RAID is not a backup, but by shifting your focus to availability you now have an approach to dealing with the "will it spin-up?" issue by proactively dealing with the problem via monitoring and rebuilds when necessary. You keep several replacement HDDs on hand for this inevitability.

Now, since you know RAID is not a backup, you put a backup system in place. This is additional cost; even more if you go 3-2-1.

So now you've got hard drives, storage arrays, HBAs, backups, and the power all of this consumes. We're starting to get out of cheap territory.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is: If you have a lot of data, hard drives are only cheap if you don't care availability, integrity, and longevity.


> hard drives are only cheap if you don't care availability, integrity, and longevity.

or your free time - but what is not worth even ones free time can't be worth much to one at all so...


I hate comments like this. This is Hacker News, we are highly tech educated and wealthy on average. I specced a 71 TB usable array that can survive losing 3 of 8 drives.

$2000. (shucked drives, but this includes the server and ECC)

If the data is invaluable, throw down a couple of these at homes of friends and family.


I have 10 x 20 TiB volumes, software RAID6, across multiple storage arrays. I wrote my comment from experience.

I still don't consider it "cheap" even though I make a good chunk of change like many on this website, but I think this is because I think in terms of what my friends & family could afford.


You can get a 12TB HDD for a couple hundred dollars. What do you consider cheap?


Brings up an interesting topic: if I wanted to preserve a movie for 100,000 or even 1,000,000 years, how would I do it? What physical media would last that long, and could actually be played back correctly and accurately by some archaeologist in the year 1,002,025?


Plated of quartz, etched internally via focused femtosecond pulsed-laser to create tiny voids or just changes in crystal lattice that encode bits as changes in the polarization of light passing back through the glass.

It's been studied in various ways for a while now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7L_wdEuQXs


The best we have are M-Discs, a type of durable BD-R disc that are supposed to last up to 1000 years.


None. Found a monastery to make copies every thousand years or so.


Good points, but the answer is simple. Torrent it.


Funnily enough I remember reading somewhere that this was some of The Daily Show’s secret sauce in where they would DVR/record all the other news programs.


They use "TV Eyes" a service that records all cable channels constantly and allows you to search through them and download clips of that segment.


How have they not been sued into oblivion?


It seems there was a lawsuit that they won, then lost on appeal, and then the Supreme Court decided not to let it escalate further.

> This case stems from a copyright infringement case filed by Fox News back in 2013 against TVEyes [...]

> On December 3rd [2018], the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for writ of certiorari in TVEyes, Inc. v. Fox News Network, LLC, declining the opportunity to decide what would have been the Court’s first case on fair use in a copyright context in 20 years. [1]

[1] https://ipwatchdog.com/2018/12/31/scotus-declines-2d-cir-mar...


They are part of the industry with better lawyers likely helps.


Because the content is not being broadcasted.


I can't help thinking that zapping sites with no warning is intended to defeat amateur archivists.


Stable, Horse, bolted ...

    Other content lost in the purge were clips and full episodes of other short-lived late-night entries like The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, the Chris Hardwick-hosted @midnight (predecessor to After Midnight), and Lights Out with David Spade.
To quote Life of Brian "I know where to get it if you want it" ... these shows were archived as they aired.


I imagine that finding copies of much of that will be difficult. I know someone who took to the high seas for episodes of the Colbert Report, but how many people are still seeding full seasons of that, let alone shows like Lights Out which were nowhere near as popular.


There are still private trackers going on two decades old now with packrat members who have home NAS systems with everything they've ever watched saved away and shared on request with other members in good standing .. less high seas piracy, more community of collectors with digital VHS tapes.


They got an estimate for the audit on expired copyrights and media use and though "fuck it". Probably going to monetize and re-release cleared highlights at a later date.


At least crate a YouTube channel as a archive and upload the videos there. Will mantain te brand presence, avoid some backlash, and maybe earn some money with ad revenue.


By the time I finish this comment someone else will have pointed it out, but the S and B in 'website' are the wrong way around.


wild to think that the web is old enough now that major media properties are shutting down websites.


CC has a YouTube channel and a FB page. Did they delete content from their as well?


YT: https://www.youtube.com/@ComedyCentral/

I don't know, I guess you'd have to search regularly to find out.

I do see 9-11-year-old episodes of The Daily Show and Colbert Report currently on CC's YT page, yet not available on Paramount Plus. Maybe Paramount Plus will use YT to gauge which of their back-catalog there is interest for.


This firms up a moral case for torrents as a distributed archival method.


Everything is available on Usenet. So it's not such a big deal.


Ha! Historical rhymes—film, magnetic tape, and now hard drives?


I guess I gotta be the one to point out the typo in the title.

*website


Yo ho ho...!


The Daily Show, during all those classic Jon Stewart years.

And sure enough, it's gone.

My first try, the classic interview between Jon and Joe Biden in 2015, where Biden admits he unwittingly politically used a story about a family coal miner that didn't exist. Interviews with Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice. Their 2000 and 2004 coverage of the RNC and DNC conventions, all gone.

https://www.cc.com/video/j6f55l/the-daily-show-with-jon-stew... https://www.cc.com/video/kqe9tb/the-daily-show-with-jon-stew...

Yeah, I think I have a feeling about that, but I think really this is just a loss of some of our common story.


someone alert r/DataHoarder this still works for the moment https://www.adultswim.com/videos/

oh wait that is cartoonetwork, nevermind, well actually you never know


The enshitification continues.


don't worry people, you will still be able to ask chatgpt about most videos that were on that website /s


With the new twists every time you ask for it! Stay tuned!




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