First on LateNighter: One of the richest repositories of late-night videos is no longer.
ComedyCentral.com had been home to clips from every episode of The Daily Show since 1999, and the entire run of The Colbert Report, but as of Wednesday morning, those clips (and most everything else on the site) are gone.
Instead, visitors to the Comedy Central site are greeted with this message: “While episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website, you can watch Comedy Central through your TV provider. You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows.”
Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
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.
This morning’s closure of ComedyCentral.com comes days after two other Paramount-owned sites—MTV.com and CMT.com—also went dark.
The move would appear to be part of continued belt-tightening measures at Paramount, which is more than $14 billion in debt, led by losses at Paramount+ and its aging cable networks. The company had been in merger talks with Skydance up until earlier this month when Shari Redstone, Paramount’s largest shareholder, is reported to have killed the deal at the eleventh hour.
Those hoping to view clips from Comedy Central’s golden age of late-night programming will still find some clips on YouTube, but nothing near the complete collection that had been available on ComedyCentral.com.
UPDATE: On Wednesday evening, a representative from Paramount offered the following statement: “As part of broader website changes across Paramount, we have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, driving fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows.”
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If Peacock can monetize old Saturday Night Live episodes, why can’t Paramount Plus monetize old Colbert/Daily Show clips? Or at least upload them officially to Youtube and get some ad revenue?
The odd thing is they seemed to be pretty well monetized on comedycentral.com. I happened to be on the site last night watching old Daily Show clips and there were :30 sec ads running before each clip.
I can understand that maybe the Comedy Central website wasn’t getting all that much traffic anymore. But like they should be monetizable somewhere if not Paramount Plus! (Youtube, Pluto, ?!)
Mtv.com and ComedyCentral.com are still up and working fine.
The website is still there but you can’t watch The Daily Show on it. It just now has a link to Paramount+ which has episodes from the last 2 seasons, which is literally what was stated in this article.
Seems like people should protest paramount+ and sink that ship completely. This is war.
Not surprised.
CC app killed off back in Jan/Feb.
CC.com has had a popup warning all month, warning of the pending pulling of all episodes.
And TVLand.com had a popup warning beginning end of May, saying full episodes (i.e. Younger) gone June 17.
Does not matter if you pay for cable/satellite television, you must pay $$$ for Paramount+ to STREAM any episodes from the mentioned channels!
Anyone want to wager how long till CBS.com does away with their FREE streaming episodes (usually only queue of last 5)?
**Note: both Younger (all 7 seasons) AND The Daily Show (last 2 seasons) are visible & streaming on Paramount+ website.
**And don’t get me started about Comedy Central not televising the entire guest interview, such that 9 times out of 10 you would have to go to CC.com to watch the EXTENDED interview for Daily Show’s guest(s).
It’s the archival content that’s gone from Comedy Central, MTV and CMT (and TV Land) websites, not the sites themselves. Comedy Central and TV Land had older streaming content removed, while MTV and CMT had their archival entertainment news articles (dating as far back as 1996) axed.
WTF! I am not a comedian this is absolutely awful and ridiculous.. censoring comedy of the past at a time when when it was acceptable!! I don’t believe any comedy should be censored. It’s comedy if people are so thin skin then don’t watch it.