I’d like to take a moment to thank Comedy Central for doing stellar stuff on the web, right in line with the NRKbeta Doctrine:

The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it.

Both The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report have every single episode online to watch in great quality with rarely an ad in sight.  I won’t say this too loudly for fear of it coming true but I could actually handle more ads in these online shows provided there aren’t too many of them (I’d say three is a reasonable limit, a total of nine per show).  I’d still come back to watch this streaming flash version and I’ll tell you why.  They’re available instantly, they’re available in my country (Norway) without having to use trickery to bypass artificially constructed country borders online, they’re available quickly after their original airing in the US, they Just Work on my Mac Mini that I have connected to the TV at home, they have all right pretty good image quality, and I can watch them without sitting through oodles of ads.

Actually, speaking of being available quickly, NRK broadcasts The Daily Show too, but with a week lag.  To me that’s just not good enough for a daily satirical show of that character.  Maybe the guys over at NRKbeta has some convincing to do still in their own organisation.  Admittedly it’s not their content, but seeing as they probably pay good money for it I would think they feel a certain ownership all the same.

The alternative then, if Comedy Central weren’t the hip people they apparently are, is Bittorrent.  Popular shows like The Daily Show have no shortage of seeders so a download is fairly quick, but Comedy Central, for the reasons I listed above, manages to be a better alternative.  Listen up record and movie industry: this is how you can make stuff better than free.

Well done, Comedy Central!  That’s exactly what we’ve been asking for! Revisiting the doctrine