One of the largest American media conglomerates, Viacom, is pulling two of Comedy Central’s most popular shows: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report off the online video giant Hulu. Relax…Comedy Central has no plans to switch to the  increasingly popular idea of a pay wall. They’ve simply come to the realization that there is no need to split ad revenue with a site like Hulu when they can keep the content in-house on ComedyCentral.com.

The fact is that if consumers are interested in the content, they will find it online. Clearly, there is an inverse relationship between a show’s popularity and its need to be on Hulu.  Does this mean that, in the future, Hulu will be consumers’ No. 1 stop for Hee Haw reruns?  I seriously doubt it, but it will be interesting to see if more of television’s most popular shows follow Viacom’s lead…

For more details on this issue, and another perspective, read the recent New York Times article, “Viacom Will Take ‘Daily Show,’ ‘Colbert’ off Hulu.”

Related posts:

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Media Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.