I’m hoping the following is just due to some sort of technical difficulties:

The above image is a screencapture from the usually excellent online video player showing new episodes of The Daily Show with John Stewart every day.  The video player is replaced with a black screen and the text Sorry. Full Episodes of The Daily Show are not available in your area. There’s no other message, so I assume area refers to non-U.S.  I’ve previously praised both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for their willingness to “compete with free”, and judging by the ire on The Daily Show forum people are not happy with this step backwards:

WTF… What are you people on comedy central thinking disabling The Daily Show to the entire world. Don’t you guys want to make some money of the ads??? The only result of your actions is that your viewers are forced to download this show from other sources. (eztv, TPB and so on, and so on…)

I’m not sure I agree with the statement; no one is forcing anyone to download anything. There could of course be hundreds of reasons to pull the online feed for non-U.S. viewers (not the least the fact that foreign tv channels buy episodes of this show), but if we make the assumption that The Daily Show managed to draw people away from watching their show through torrent downloads I think it’s a shame they haven’t managed to maintain this positive development in some way, whatever the reason for the block.

Somewhat related is this NRKbeta-article (in Norwegian) where Øyvind Solstad criticises the official Britain’s Got Talent Youtube channel for being fabulously late after their Susan Boyle video went viral – and then after actually publishing the video online themselves the video is cut (half the size of the fan-published version) and crippled (no embed allowed so you can’t publish the video on your site).

It’s no good trying to compete with free if the free product is better.  And I think the above illustrates the NRKbeta doctrine as well as anything. Publish it quick, make it easy to download – even if we have to pay for it somehow, and above all let your content flourish by allowing people to be creative with and around it.

Bah, what do I know?

I do know this:  my daily Daily Show has been disturbed, and I’m mad as hell – and so on…

Update: It’s due to the foreign tv deals. The Daily Show blocked outside of U.S.